Recently in Britt's Bytes Category

Leaving the scene of a web page for the scroll function of the mouse can be a waste of effort. Why isn't there a scroll wheel on the keyboard? Well, a very select few come with a built-in scroll wheel, but it's usually just a justification of adding to the price of a relatively high-profit-margin item already. What if I told you there was a scroll wheel already built-in to your keyboard? The humble spacebar is coded to act as a fast scroll in Safari, Firefox, and many other Mac applications. When viewing a page that's longer than the window, just tap the spacebar and it'll jump--useful for scrolling a long window quickly.

As our intrepid Windows users may already know, the full-size keyboard contains many useful keys for quick navigation of documents, web pages included. The "home," "end," "page up" and "page down" keys are there as relics from the pre-mouse days when most of what was done on a computer took the form of long pages of various lines of text or code. But there's more! The arrow keys are another multi-directional scroll entry point. Left, right, up and down, they will scroll through documents big and small! However, the space bar is placed in a location that allows for a fast click down a page, whereas the other keys require hand movement, something I strive to avoid as much as possible. A word of caution: the space bar works as a space bar in t e x t d o c u m e n t s , b u t f o r o t h e r a p p l i c a t i o n s , s p a c e a r o u n d ! ! ! [Britt Godwin]

So I've got the Open Apple Bookmark key in Safari, but what if I use Firefox?

As those of us using a Mac are ahead of the game already, many of us are using the open-source (read: Free) web browser Firefox. As I explained in my last column regarding the Open Apple "D" to bookmark a web site in Safari, I like doing things as simply as possible. Thoreau's mandate of "Simplify, Simplify, Simplify" is especially true in the world of I.T., but alas, is often not meant to be. But enough about gates, windows and other hardware construction.

Firefox wants you to be able to access your bookmarks quickly and easily, preferably without taking your hands from the keyboard, as if your hands are on the keyboard, you're probably doing something important (your erstwhile author notwithstanding). To access your bookmarks in Firefox, they included a logical command sequence (if 2 buttons can be called a sequence--a "duo-quence, perhaps?)--Open Apple button and "B." That has the effect of opening up a side bar with all your bookmarks right there. But that's not even the cool part--it also opens up a search field with the input focus already there (in other words, just open and type). Searching in this toolbar is like searching for music in iTunes--with each letter typed, it dynamically searches your bookmarks for the most likely matches and brings them to the fore. Instead of scrolling through Freya-knows how many bookmarks looking for that "something I bookmarked a week ago that had to do with dwarf goats and maple syrup," you can just type in goats, and there it is! Easy! Constructive laziness triumphs again!!! [Britt Godwin]

As many of you may know by now, I am a big fan of easier ways to do routine tasks on my Macs. I don't feel that this necessarily makes me a "power user," rather I see myself as wanting to eliminate as many extraneous movements as possible. Call it constructively lazy.

One of my favorite ways to eliminate unnecessary caloric exertion is by minimizing the movements from the keyboard to the mouse and vice-versa. While surfing the wonders of the World Wide Web, I begin to experience Web whiplash from switching back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse in order to pull down the bookmarks menu and bookmark a site, then back to the keyboard, and over to the mouse again, and back, and forth and back... You get the idea. There is a quicker and easier way, O fearless readers! Take heart! The heavens opened, the angels sang, and there was the Apple key!!! With this slick little tool, all one has to do to bookmark a site is merely press the key (I use my middle finger, but your mileage may vary), and while holding the Open Apple key, press the "D" button. Now why the "D" button, rather than "B" for "Bookmark?" My theory is that if your fingers are already on the home keys, trying to reach the Open Apple with one finger and the "B" key with another begins to look like mini yoga. Some of you may be that flexible, but I get cramps trying to do things like that. Your fingers are already on the "D" button, so that saves another step at the expense of mnemonic recall. However, "D" sounds just like "B," making the recall easier. Try it--there's no substitute for a good mouse, but sometimes it's just too far away. [Britt Godwin]

The recent upgrade to 10.4 Tiger has changed a few things, mostly for the better, but one of the minor quibbles I'd like to address is that Preview will no longer play animated .Gif files. This is particularly annoying for those of us that create web pages, as Preview was a fast, easy way to see the various animated .Gif's in a collection. All the little animated smilies in web pages banging their yellow heads against brick walls, dancing or singing can no longer be viewed as an animated file from the hard drive using Preview, which was the default way to view these up until now. The decision to eliminate this admittedly niche, but useful little function is beyond me to decipher, but take heart, .Gif fans! Safari to the rescue!!!

To play an animated .Gif, right-click (or control-click for those single-buttoners) and in the resulting menu, instead of Preview as the default, select Safari. It will open a new blank page with your .Gif bopping, or bouncing, or doing whatever it is animated .Gif's do with their spare time. I hate to admit it, but I think Windows beat us on this one... [Britt Godwin]

The Bookmarks Toolbar Folder in Firefox and the corresponding Bookmarks Bar in Safari can provide a quick shortcut to commonly-accessed bookmarks, instead of scrolling down through sometimes many dozen (or hundreds, in my case, but no--I'm not really that disorganized...) bookmarks in search of your financial page or family homepage. When bookmarking a site, it goes into a long list, accessed through the Bookmarks menu. When bookmarking a site, a menu asks you where you'd like to save it. The default location is in the Bookmarks menu, but this window contains a pull-down menu in which "Bookmarks Toolbar" is an option.

This saves the bookmark in a slim bar below the address bar (http://www.yaddayadda.com.etc) as a 1-click button to take you right to the site you need. I keep my financial bookmarks, theater movie listing sites and search engines loaded up in mine.

You can even rename them, so instead of a long, convoluted name specified by the site, you can just rename it "Visa" or "Homepage." To do that in Safari, right-click (or Ctrl-click, for one-button users), select "Edit Name" and you now have a 1-button shortcut to a commonly-used link. Saves time and frustration, both valuable commodities in the often-convoluted digital world. [Britt Godwin]

So it's late, you're feeling like rocking out to your favorite tunes, and you really don't want to listen to a random selection of everything in your iTunes Music Library. You could really go for just the best tracks of your collection without the weird b-sides or songs that just didn't quite make the cut. This is where the Rating Stars come into play.

Rating stars are a way to organize your music in yet another way, unique to you alone. It is a way for you to pick just the cream of the crop when a playlist is too limited and the full library is too much. Rating stars allow you to listen to just those couple of great tracks that get your heart rate jumping and your feet hopping, like radio stations way back when, but without the annoying DJ's and used car commercials.

To assign a star rating from 1 to 5 onto a track, right-click (or Control-Click for 1-button users) on a track name in the iTunes main window. This will bring up a short menu on which the second track is My Rating. Select a star or 5 and let iTunes do the rest. For even more control, make a Smart Playlist and tell it to put only 5-star songs in that contain "Sad Songs" in the comments box. I explain the beauty of Smart Playlists here. For now, shoot for the stars!

Many times in my articles you have noticed me referring to a "right-click" (at least, I hope so...), whereas the default mouse shipped with Apple computers has been inexplicably a single-button mouse. This is changing with the advent of the Mighty Mouse from Apple, but there are legions of the faithful still using a single-button mouse. Why, you ask, is a second button so important? For Apple in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to simplify such silly Goldberg-esque contraptions such as drivers, DLL files and Explorer trees in favor of an interface that is elegant in its streamlined, intuitive logic.

However, as computers will always (in the forseeable future, anyway...) be a relatively complex device, certain measures are required to effectively interface with a machine containing literally billions of moving parts. They don't move far, but the fact they all work constantly astounds me. How does this relate to a second button on a mouse? First, an explanation of the second (or third, etc...) button: A single button is like a finger--with a single finger you can do things like turning on light switches, operating a remote control, and other movements requiring simple directions. Typing would soon become not only unbearably slow but with the resulting frustration, actually hazardous to your health (or am I the only one with keyboard rage?). A right mouse button doubles the complexity of the device, but since it only had one button to begin with, I feel it's not too great a jump. However, that second button opens up realms full of options that can make life in the digital world simpler and quicker. This may seem paradoxical, as doubling the device's complexity rarely improves anything, but bear with me.

Even Apple cannot entirely engineer a second button out of the computer--it may have been fine in System 6 while playing Asteroids on a 9" mono screen, but in today's computing world, anything beyond double-clicking needs a second button. Let me explain: think of a second button not as added complexity, but as a fingertip menu to access often-used commands. In Microsoft Word, for instance, selecting a batch of text and copying it, then pasting requires the selection of the text with the left button, then moving up to the cryptographic icons in the multiplicity of toolbars, selecting "Copy," then moving to the spot at which the paste will be completed, going back to the toolbar, selecting "Paste," and hopefully, if you got the insertion bar placed right, the operation is complete. In a simple text editor like TextEdit, there are no commands in the toolbar--you have to use an Apple Menu pull-down to find Copy and Paste.

Now with a right mouse button, all you need to do is select the text, then right-click, and Tada! There are your Copy and Paste commands right there at your fingertips. This is only one of the examples in which a right-click can save time and more importantly, hand movement, and over the millions of motions an average user will perform over their computing career, saving 2 or 3 out of 20 or so (empirically determined) is a significant savings. Try right-clicking on other things around the computer (if so equipped, or if not, the equivalent command is Control-Click). Once you have mastered the right button, the other half of your computer will be opened to you. Happy clicking!!!

I know what you're thinking: This computer can't be all that smart... it just does what I tell it to. Even my wife doesn't do that, and she's smarter than I am. But lo! There on the horizon! A whiiiiiiiite whaaaaaale!!! No, sorry. Wrong article.

Wouldn't it be nice if every time you imported a sad song, it went into a playlist with all the other sad songs, or when preparing to burn an Audio CD, the playlist would limit itself to just what will fit on 1 CD (or 2 or whatever)? That would be smart, and that's where the Smart Playlist comes in. Similar to the category headings in iTunes (Artist, Song, Genre, etc.), Smart playlists allow you to define and refine those headings with a surprisingly powerful, yet easy-to-use list of criteria.

To open a new Smart Playlist, open iTunes and pull down the "File" menu from the top Apple Menu. Select "New Smart Playlist" which will open a small window with text fields. There are "+" and "-" buttons next to the first field. This is where you can get specific. Each one of those buttons opens another field for further refinement of your library. Go ahead and start a new Smart Playlist--now select a criteria from the first pull-down menu (it'll say "Artist"). Let's make it "Date Added" and use the second pull-down menu to make it "is in the last" 1 week. Now hit the "+" to open up another field and let's make this one "Genre," telling it that we want it to only contain "Rock." Live Updating is checked by default, so we hit "OK" and our playlist is created. The default name will be "Rock," but by clicking on it, you can rename it whatever you'd like. Now, any time you add a song to your iTunes Music Library with the info fields filled out (done by default from iTunes Music Store), it will find all the music added in the last week that is listed as "Rock" and add it to that playlist. This can be a great tool for importing from CD's as well, as iTunes will automatically connect to the CDDB database and find the info for the CD for you, ready to import with all the pertinent info filled in already. With a few of these Smart Playlists created, this can take much of the organizational burden off you, as every time you add a track, it can automatically go where it is supposed to. Unless you like running your fingers through your playlists and savoring the feel of days' worth of musical bliss, but I could be the only one who does that...? What can I say--I'm a musical micromanager, and these Smart Playlists let me do it because I want to and no longer because I have to. Now that's working smarter instead of harder. [Britt Godwin]

iTunes of course comes standard with a predetermined set of categories for sorting your tunes such as Track Name, Genre, and Artist, but there are more hidden away that will allow you to organize your musical library to a degree that would give a librarian hives. In the main music window (where all the names of the tracks and artists are displayed), there is a skinny bar above all the names of the tunes. This usually has the headings Name, Time, Artist, Bit Rate, etc. Right-click (or Control-Click for 1-button users) on any of these headings and a drop-down menu will appear. This can also be accessed through the Apple Menu Bar under "Edit" and then at the bottom, "View Options."

This menu has a rather extensive list for organizing your collection according to the usual methods--Artist, Album, Bit Rate, etc., but also contains headings as obscure as the Year the track was released, the Sample Rate, or even the most recently played tracks. This wealth of information allows you to lay your hands on any track or group of tracks fitting nearly any criteria you select within seconds (or even less). Suppose you're putting on a dance party and want just the tracks with more than 100 beats per minute. Select that option and iTunes will bring that to the top of the display column, ready to bounce. Maybe you're in a Rachmaninov mood and want to find everything you have by him--select the Composer option, and Bang! There is every composer listed, all without having to remember how to spell Rachmaninov.

All this functionality comes with a price, however--in order to sort by these categories, the information must be there to begin with. For those of you who have come by your musical collections in ways other than the iTunes Music Store, it can potentially be a long process. However, happily the iTunes Music Store tracks come with all pertinent information already inputted for you, so all you have to do is select which way you want your tunes displayed, and iTunes is there for you. Now you can shuffle your tunes like a hand of cards or you can stack the deck any way you want. With this deck, it's always going to turn up a full house. [Britt Godwin]

Tabbed browsing is a great way to maximize screen real estate while keeping your browsing organized. Along with the "Open link in new tab" command, found by Ctrl-clicking (or right-clicking if using a multi-button mouse). This will open up a new toolbar underneath the address bar, called the tab bar, appropriately enough. This is where you can essentially store links that you'd like to follow up later. Today's web pages are so rich with links that there are invariably more places to go then memory available to remember them (and I mean the gray cells). But, you counter, can't I just click the back button when I'm done following a link? Yes, but going back through the maze of links is time-consuming, click-intensive and frequently annoying, especially if some of the sites have popups, spyware or worse.

Tabbed browsing allows those fragments of thought processes to occupy a concrete (well, as permanent as anything on the web) spot, awaiting only your attention to return and give those frozen moments life, like ephemeral bookmarks. It has the added advantage of loading pages in the background, so that when you are ready to return, they are fully loaded and ready to peruse (unless you're on dial-up, in which case the limited bandwidth would be better spent loading the current page). For those with a memory like a Swiss... umm... a thing with holes in it, tabbed browsing allows us the luxury of putting links on a back burner for later retrieval. Open up the tabbed browsing and give it a try--after a little while you'll wonder what the back button is for.

For those of you using Mozilla Firefox or Safari as your primary browser(s), give yourselves a pat on the back. Far more secure, responsive and leaner than Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are the two top browsers available for any system. Since the Mozilla team just released the 1.5 beta version, today I'm going to focus on setting up Firefox for a basically secure browser. Surprisingly few of the security settings are by default in a secure mode, but this also makes the browser easier to use. If all the settings were locked down, it would be like opening a bank vault every time you wanted to go outside. My personal security settings are like a deadbolt on your front door--less secure than the bank vault, but easier to use on a daily basis. Your personal settings may change as you delve deeper into security particulars.

For now, I'll start with where these settings are found: they are located in the Preferences menu under "File" in the Menu Bar when Firefox is running. Opening the Preferences brings up a window with icons "General," and "Privacy." Clicking on "Privacy" brings up a row of tabs, one of which is Cookies. This tab allows sites to set or be denied cookies with better customization than either Safari or Internet Explorer. My personal settings consist of allowing sites to set cookies, but for the originating site only, and unless I have removed cookies set by the site before. I also select "Keep Cookies: Until I close Firefox" which allows the sites to set temporary cookies for use at financial institutions or the like, then securely delete them afterwards. It is functional, and even though it leaves a short trail, the trail is deleted soon afterward. Closing your browser is always a good way to close that trail after going to a sensitive site like your bank anyway, so once in the habit, Firefox will help keep your computer secure and clean.

There is something rather odd about Safari, and that is an initial download and install turns out to be lacking a "Home" button in the toolbar. Now I realize that the home page for many is merely a point on the way to wherever is the ultimate destination, but it can be so much more than that. It is aptly named, as it is the beginning of all journeys into the great digital unknown and a familiar place to return to after the hard work of pushing back the darkness.

I personally use Google Web as my home page, as I do extensive searching on a wide variety of topics, and it is nice to be able to return from cluttered, pop-up ridden, cookie-infested web wrecks to the clean, even austere interface of Google, from whence to clear the (wireless) air and again sally forth.

Picking and personalizing a home page will be a near-future subject, patient webcrawlers, but first we will find the home page button. It is hidden, but easily uncovered. In the same toolbar in which are found the "<" and ">" and "http://www.snarkybubbles.com" bar, right click in between any of the buttons or the address bar, in the gray spaces between (that would make a great title for a sonnet, perhaps in the vein of T.S. Eliot...). That will bring up a menu with "Customize toolbar" at the bottom. Selecting that option will bring up a small window with buttons, and lo and behold! a Home button! Eureka! Now, as we are using a Mac, merely drag & drop the buttons you find most useful (I use back/forward, home and text size in my bar). Click the blue glowing "Done" and you now have a Home button, ready to serve as a base, a launch pad for the flights of discovery ahead. [Britt Godwin]

There are two kinds of cookies; one is sugar and sweet and good to eat and the other is made of snails and puppy dog tails. Cookies were an experiment to attempt to make the internet experience easier for the average person to navigate, storing favorite settings on websites, or preferences for particular areas so that when you go to www.banjoworld.com, you can go straight to "jugband blues" without having to go through the entire site every time. They have since become an evil tool to track where you go, what you do there, where you come from and where you go afterwards.

The good news is, you can burn these cookies and throw them out. Safari makes this process easy, and while we're at it, we're going to turn on the Pop-up window blocker. When you open Safari, click on the name "Safari" in the menu bar, right next to the Apple and "Edit" up on the top. When the menu comes down, select "Block Popup windows." Now open that same "Safari" menu again--there should be a check mark next to "Block Popup windows." Good. In that same menu, select "Preferences" right above it. A preferences window will come up with a top row of icons with things like General, Appearance and Security. Select "Security" and click the button that says "Only from sites you navigate to." That stops most advertisers from seeing where you came from and where you go afterwards, but as they get more clever, they are able to glean more information from less. For better security, use Mozilla Firefox, which gives you more control over cookies. A final note of caution: some sites require cookies to function properly, such as some financial sites and other secured sites, but now that you know how to turn them off and on, they will only see what you want them to. This should help cut down on spam email as well, as cookies are one of the tools used to tailor email spam. Happy Baking! [Britt Godwin]

First order of business: if you're not using iTunes, you need to be. Many things in the tech business are viewpoint-sensitive, but iTunes is concrete: it is THE source for music, both your own and for discovering others'. In that vein of discovery, for those of you running Tiger v.10.4 (found under the Apple Menu in the upper left-hand corner, in the menu item called "About this Mac;" also a great place to find out nearly anything about your machine hardware you need to know [go to More Info].), Podcasting in iTunes is an amazing resource full of information and opinion on nearly any topic you can think of. iTunes Music Store even does their own podcast every Tuesday, highlighting the new music available on the iTunes Music Store. It's called, appropriately enough, "iTunes New Music Tuesday," and can be searched for and downloaded right through the iTunes Music Store and listened to just like any other music file. In Tiger, iTunes makes it really easy, as the menu item called "Podcasts" in iTunes' sidebar not only keeps these organized, but allows you to automatically update your Podcasts whenever they are updated from the source. All you have to do is click and listen to the new one like you would Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits. (Or am I the only one...?)

Oh, and one more thing... Did I mention that all the thousands of podcasts, from such luminaries as Nova Science, CNN, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, CBS, NPR, and way too many others to even start to list here, are all FREE? Yes, I said it. FREE. Not "free" after purchase of program or gadget, but FREE as in, "all you need is iTunes."

For those of you not using Tiger yet, you can listen to podcasts as well, just not quite as easily. You're going to have to find them on your own, or find them at the iTunes Music Store, then go download the files from the respective websites. They will come out as a URL with a funny ending like www.podgeek.xml or something like that. iTunes will play those, too. It'll just go into your library as an .mp3 file and you can listen to it from there. I'm listening to Ockham's Razor. Check it out...

So an updated Version 5 of iTunes... I fail to understand why this is a full release, as the list of new/improved features is kinda small. Pretty, but small--like a kitten. It looks sharper, with that obnoxious brushed metal gone (what's next? diamondplate steel themes?) as well as the buttons, frames and pseudo-LCD having been cleaned up and smoothed out. Another interesting addition is the way the iTunes Music Store preview clips fade in at the beginning and out again at the end. So instead of a sheared-off 30 seconds of music, we get 10 seconds of music almost too low volume to hear. It sounds sophisticated, though.

Anyway, the reason for this column is tips 'n' tricks for Apple apps. One of the new additions to iTunes is the ability to add folders to the "Source" frame, usually full of playlists. This makes organizing your grooves into neat packages even easier than it already is, thanks to Jobs & Co. So you're putting on a party, and for the first hour you want some good background tunes while the guests are arriving and getting settled (or lit, as the case may be), then you want the playlist to shift gears, up or down, and finally the end of the night as all is winding down (or wobbling off), the beats change to an ambient groove. Folders in iTunes can do that now--instead of making one big playlist of all that and trying to navigate in the middle of kegstands (or Monopoly), make a folder with the requisite playlists in it and set it to go.

To create a folder in iTunes, either hit the "hotkeys" (Shift / Option / OpenApple / N -- all at the same time!) or just go to the File menu (with iTunes open, of course) and select "New Folder." That creates a new folder that is just itching for you to rename it something like "Bob's Bongo Beats," and when you're done naming your new creation, it needs to be populated, like any empty space (no political jokes, please). Just drag and drop playlists onto the blue bar named "Bob's Bongo Beats," and voila (literally: voila) you have the whole night ready to bongo!!! [Britt Godwin]

So piracy is wrong. We've established that. So what happens when copyright law serves only to slap at the very fans of the technology in question? Case in point: Emulated video games from the old NES, SNES, Atari, Commodore64 and other "retro" games including older arcade cabinets are quickly fading into oblivion as the hardware necessary to run them is eclipsed by the newest and fastest and bloodiest the gaming industry has to offer. There is a small but loyal (fanatic?) following of old-school gamers who have taken the talent and time to painstakingly create emulators for these old systems in order to run these classic games, and even the worst of them is worthy of at least a try. The best rival anything the major software companies have to offer.

The emulators are often free of charge, out of the goodness of some altruistic code junkie's heart, and the commercial versions are far cheaper than even one of the old cartridge games cost when new. Thousands of games exist between the old systems, many of them classics, even when measured against the best and brightest of the new generation. I used to spend hours (ok, days...) playing games like Super Mario 3, Excitebike, 1943 and one of my all-time favorite games for any system, Black Tiger. I must have put several hundred dollars in that game alone.

Now the legalities: the problem is that you cannot play an emulated game unless you possess the original cartridge from which the ROM was loaded and emulated. This presents a quandary: do we let these games fade into oblivion, fondly remembered, but legally dead, or is it our duty to maintain this priceless treasure belonging to gamers old and young? To clarify: if the game companies could get together and release these games as legal compilations, I would be happy to buy the disc(s) and commence smashing goombas and munching Pac-Man dots, but as long as those companies are concerned more for protecting their little spot of turf, I fear it is but a mirage, wavering in the heat coming off the massed ranks of lawyers. I wish I had the skill and talent to take a chunk of 1's and 0's and resurrect my old favorites, but alas, I do not. Knowing someone out there does and has, however gives hope that all is not lost, and there really is an infinite lives code to punch in at the title screen of the console. [Britt Godwin]

Here--it's for you...

...just a second, be right with you... Yeah... no, I didn't know about the fish and the CD-ROM... Ok, see you later... Bye. Sorry about that--my phone has been ringing off the hook lately. So, Apple is reportedly edging closer to an "iPhone" something-or-rather, with rumors of being its own cell carrier as well. Apple has a chance to absolutely slaughter the market with this product, as they did with the iconic iPod a few years back. However, to make this a reality, the rumored "25-song cap" would have to be nonexistent, with at least the Shuffle's 512 MB capacity, along with superior battery life, something Apple has been struggling with recently, going even so far as having a class-action brought against them. To make this venture a success, Apple would need at least 6-hour talk / music time and 12-14 hour standby, especially if they're going to do a PDA sort of thing like the Blackberry. However, this is where Apple could get in over their head. Trying to cram too much into a device like this could run the unit into Pocket PC-size range, which would be far too clunky to fit into consumers' pockets (or pocketbooks) and Jobs' aesthetics. An iPod-sized unit would be about the maximum dimensions acceptable, as even the original uber-unit Blackberry was criticized for being too chunky.

Personally, I retired my cell phone a year ago after a year of service, and although there are moments when it would come in handy, I see it less as a vital accoutrement and more as a leash/crutch for making people think their lives are more interesting and important than they really are. But this is not a rant on cell phones (I'll save that for another article); rather, I will be waiting with bated breath to see what new industry-defining gadget Apple will unleash next, because I'm just that kind of geek, whether I'll have a use for the device or not... [Britt Godwin]

Go ahead--say it... "I knew it!!!"

A recent study at the University of Pennsylvania Scranton, lucidly titled "AGFD 10" has validated what we geeks have known in our little digital hearts all along--that coffee is good for you! Now, don't go hooking up the IV drip just yet, as with anything, moderation is key (may not be as much fun as blinding excess, but you won't look like an epileptic on crack, either).

The study found that based on density and frequency of consumption, coffee was the number one delivery system for antioxidants among over one hundred different foods, among them traditional sources for antioxidants like red wine, black tea and red grapes.

So what's a free radical? No, not a Bush protester, but an oxygen atom that loses an electron from its outer shell, destabilizing the atom. As atoms are most content with a full complement of electrons, it steals an electron from another atom, destabilizing it and leading to a chain reaction that can destroy whole cells. Big fat hairy deal, you say--I kill millions of brain cells every weekend! Yes, but these are particularly nasty, acting like little buzz saws on cells all over your body, and in turn creating instabilities that lead to neato things like colon cancer, skin cancer, and all sorts of other fun and exciting hobbies like chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

This isn't an excuse to refrain from eating other things that are good for you, as the uptake and utilization of antioxidants may hinge upon other chemicals and elements found in fruits and veggies, as the exact method these things work is still being worked out. So far, we know they're good for you and there are a lot of them in coffee, and so I don't really need any other reason for that beautiful cup of life in the morning, other than the fact that I am not actually recognizable as a member of the genus homo sapiens sapiens pre-coffee either, but that's just details... Who needs juice bars? We have COFFEE!!!

Intel has recently entered the supposedly burgeoning home media circus with its new Viiv (rhymes with "hive"), supplanting (or supplementing, depending) Microsoft's lagging Media Center Edition Windows XP. This would be interesting news in the home media convergence arena, with the potential to combine TV, movies, music, pictures and games all in one device, networkable throughout the home in the ideal configuration. However, this entire movement is contingent upon two factors: One, that the targeted consumer segment has both the money to set this system up, and the free time (and inclination) to use all this functionality. Second, and I feel most importantly, this infrastructure is built upon the premise that the content delivered to this system is worth watching to begin with. With the troubles of piracy, DRM, and bandwidth issues, just getting the nightly local news channel requires digital acrobatics. True convergence would ideally involve being able to watch any channel from anywhere at any time--cable, satellite, internet, while checking email and instant messaging (IM), or any of the other functions of TV or internet. Unfortunately, the content available still feels like being force-fed Microsoft ads, with advertising accompanying every channel change, an annoyance that hopefully will be excised swiftly, lest the infection kill the host.

This is neat technology, to be sure, but until the bugs are worked out and everyone is working together (which should happen about the same time the sun burns out), it is effectively a lost cause. I've said it before and I'll say it again--when it becomes easier and cheaper to get a high-quality show or file or whatever, piracy and DRM become irrelevant, and technology like the Viiv or Media Center Edition XP will come into their own. We can hope, I guess...

Google Talk has been released, co-existing within it's other recent release, Google Desktop in an apparent bid to control more of your computer than Microsoft. With Google's trademark clean interface and lack of annoying popups and flashy banner ads, Google Talk is already well on its way to becoming a serious rival of other IM clients such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo and ICQ. It's strongest suit so far seems to be its reported ability (still in development, as it it still a beta program) to interface with several rivals' services, making it a tool facilitating convergence of digital media, a feat at which Google has so far excelled (Google News, anyone?).

Google Talk also includes a feature, albeit no innovation, but well-done nonetheless, of allowing voice chat between users possessing a microphone or headset. Given Google's market share, the currently-limited pool of contacts available to call may be small, but as the program's momentum grows, especially bundled with the Google Desktop program, calling family and friends may soon be possible sans phone company involvement at all. One can only hope. For those of you with a Gmail account already, download it, call me and tell me what you think if you have a few minutes to chat. . Happy yappin'! [Britt Godwin]

If Google doesn't make a bid for world domination soon, I'll be surprised. With the Google Maps (with satellite databases no less!), the #1 web search, phone directories (through Google Local), Groups, News, Shopping, and now Google Desktop and Google Talk, it's hard to find something related to technology that Google doesn't already have an interest in. I'm waiting for the Google Edition Monopoly and Trading Cards...

I've been playing with the Google Desktop Search Beta and am pleasantly surprised. Even in Beta, it works beautifully, and is nicely unobtrusive, allowing a user to quickly search from the toolbar, from a side "dock," or from a tiny blip of a "deskbar," making the program as clean or as cluttered as you wish. I prefer a clear desktop, the better to see my extensive collection of desktop pictures, and so Desktop is residing in the toolbar for the moment, the only sign of its presence a small text space. From this text space, I can search not only my hard drive but all of Google's various searches as well, and since I use Google as my primary portal to the web to begin with, this step towards convergence and integration is well-deserved and long-awaited. I just wish I had gotten in on the IPO... [Britt Godwin]

It has come full circle, folks--some intrepid programmer with WAY too much time on his hands has ported the original Doom onto a color iPod. It requires the click wheel of the Mini and Photo iPods, and so doesn't really work very well on earlier models, but I'm sure these intrepid digital explorers would be happy to work on one in exchange for a kind email and a blank check. There is video (QT) of the game running (albeit a bit laggy, as the processor is not really designed for video gaming) on the website here and has to be seen to be believed. Doom has served as a benchmark for gaming since the days of the venerable Intel 386 processor (how the time flies...), showing up on each new generation of gaming, through the NES, SNES, Playstation, and even on cell phones and now, iPods. There are games that give me motion sickness (Half-Life 2), and yet id Software's revolutionary brainchild is still one of the coolest games ever. Who can say no to a double-barreled shotgun, anyway?

In a related story, another (yes, there are more people doing this kind of stuff) [I wonder if there's a support group - bg] venerable gaming benchmark has been ported through ipodlinux and microwindows. This emulator requires a bit of geek cred and linux skill, but if you're hacking your iPod, it shouldn't be too hard for you. All in all, Game Boy games aren't too far off the games included in any iPod or even the latest cell phones, but brick bashing just ain't no fun without Mario stompin' Goombas to boot. This project, at GB Emulator, is not quite as far along as the aforementioned Doom port, but an alpha release has been disseminated, and this thing is COOL! Old skool gameboy on a 4G iPod is just crazy! What's next, Super Mario Kart? 10 years ago we all went nuts over a pixelly, first-person shooter that required pretty hard-core hardware for the time to run well. Now, just a few short years later, we're running these games on music players. Moore better pick up the pace on his law... [Britt Godwin]

So after using the new Apple Mighty Mouse for a period of time and getting a feel for it (pun intended...), I really want to like it--it's a beautiful design, it has a right-click function and even some kind of scroll wheel/ball/thingy, *BASH!* and did I mention it's Apple? The CPI resolution (captures per inch, a measure of accuracy of the tiny camera in the sensor) is set at a default 400 CPI, as reported by the chip manufacturer Agilent, but can be programmed for 800 CPI as well, which is what it looks like Apple did, as it is quick and responsive, even while pushing it in a game environment such as Half-Life 2. And did I mention that it can be used on the PC, too? *WHAM!* Do we have ourselves a gaming mouse by Apple? Almost.

It's light, it's precise, and then it forces one to try and figure out the sorta-rocking clicky thing and the chintzy scroll BB thingy. *CRUNCH!* It's neat technology, with the electrical touch sensor under each "button," but the more I used it, the more I longed for my Logitech wheel mouse. The Apple mouse is one unbroken curve, top to bottom, and with my large hands I found myself inadvertently clicking while resting my hand *WHANG!* on what I thought was a non-click part of the back shell. My Logitech has a clearly-delineated section for handling the mouse (read: non-clicky and solid) and 2 buttons with a scroll wheel in the middle. Accidentally clicking while sneaking up on a Combine soldier or going for a head shot on a friend in Counter-Strike can be a bad thing. *BLAMMO!* The squeezy-clicky things on the side weirded me out as well. In Apple's Pro mouse, the same area was for maintaining a grip on the uni-body clicker in order to move the mouse, but now it is a trigger for Expose (or if you have Tiger, it's re-mappable), but is awkward to access, requiring a visual finger placement so as not to inadvertently left-click in the process.

I applaud Apple's drive to innovate, *SMASH!* but there are some things that just don't need improvement. My grandmother couldn't figure it out, and for me, that's a death sentence for hardware. Good try, but back to the cartoons, Mighty Mouse... *BAM!* [Britt Godwin]

I stumbled across a rather thought-provoking program in my random wanderings o'er the web, and while on a walk through the lake district, I came across warrior~poet's website, an artist and visual poet whose icons and desktops are of a superior caliber. His site is worth checking out for the catalogue of high-quality imagery, but the particular that got my inner playdoh artist wiggling is a link to a program by a contributor named Leo Fink called "Gaston." It is a simple enough program to understand, as there is a window with a large, colored, shiny and shadowed ball suspended inside, and a second window with a multitude of sliders. Simple. The kicker is that all the sliders deform, warp, twist and mash the ball into freeform, wind-carved organic shapes that can then be saved as a .png file, ready to be made into an icon. The deformed ball is fully 3-D and can be turned around in all axes to get the best angle. Yes, this is rather processor-intensive, and running on my 1.8GHz dual-proc G5, it was responsive enough. The pixels inherent in the model can be adjusted for performance, then kicked up once the form is right for a higher resolution. I used the default 100 (squared!) pixels for playing, then cranked it up until it looked like a high-end Maya conjuration at 500 square pixels (that's a quarter-million, btw!). The icon for the program itself is made with Gaston, and should give you a good idea of what the program does. It is a novel and unique approach to making icons, and none will be alike. Even better is that the program is freeware. If a kid brother or sister has a set of 3-D glasses, there is a check-box that makes the image 3-D, so track one down and get warped!!! [Britt Godwin]

Download Gaston

So a friend let me play with his Vista Beta install, and one thing we discovered was that it doesn't install on Virtual PC due to some kind of BIOS incompatibility. I thought that was amusing, since there's really no true BIOS to begin with in Virtual PC, but oh, well. I dredged up an old hard drive and wiped it in order to install the Beta, and the first thing I noticed was how idiot-proof it is. It asks for the activation code and where you want to install, then says, "thanks--that's all we need from you;" no region and languages settings, no chance to customize the system--just shove in the disc and go get a Coke. Definitely an upgrade, as sitting and waiting for the install to ask you which keyboard layout you'd like to use was irritating.

Once XP was up and running, the first thing I thought was, "Who Aqua-fied XP?" Yes, Windows is now glassy and shiny. The default color scheme is based on a slate gray, with subdued colors compared to XP's almost brash use of bright greens and blues. I find it an improvement. The next thing that struck me was how complete this release is--I shared a folder and my Mac saw it instantly, just like my XP install does, and even Firefox worked perfectly. I'll try a couple games tomorrow and see what happens. ATI has a driver out for Vista, both 32- and 64-bit versions, but I had difficulty installing it; whether due to the beta nature or an operator error, I don't know.

Minor differences are more improvements on XP than revolutionary changes. For example, the search bar is now at the bottom of the Start Menu (when extended), instead of having to manually click "Search." Minor, but definitely an improvement. For that matter, Search is now metadata-based, and works far better than the old "wait for 20 minutes for it to tell you it can't find the file" method, although the search window proper shows a disturbing resemblance to OS X's search window. Convergence, coincidence, or just a lack of any other ways to really show a search window?

Overall, it is far less of a revolutionary change than many of us were hoping for--it seems to be more a final version of XP with necessary security upgrades and minor improvements, especially since the new filesystem is delayed indefinitely. Maybe there'll be sweeping changes before the official release, but I'll be less excited about it then.

The Windows Longhorn Vista Beta has finally, to much fanfare, been released to the IT community and boy! is everybody excited! It's good looking, fast, and more secure, and now comes with the ability to search by metadata to find documents previously buried wherever the default directory shoved them. This is a fine gesture from the Redmond behemoth, releasing a test beta 1 to developers and MSDN subscribers to allow a head start implementing all these great new features.

There is going to be a more secure user structure, encouraging users to get away from Administrator and down a level to user, where the possibility of irreparable harm is reduced, as well as making it harder for malware attacks seeking administrator access to carry out their nefarious schemes. Faster startup and crash recovery is being honed, as well as more protected memory and system directories, to better manage unstable programs and drivers, reducing the chance that a bad driver will crash the whole system. Installation will be managed through an image-based install rather than massive directories of files to be moved and replaced ad infinitum, which should make customization easier. Lastly, the graphics scheme, the front-end, the dashboard of the whole system, is named Aero. I wonder if it's just me that seems to find some interesting parallels in the above text...? I'm surprised that they didn't name it Kitten, since it seems to have some growing to do before it can run with the big cats... [Britt Godwin]

As Podcasting catches on, with a swiftly-increasing throng of 'Casters, the questions surrounding this new medium become more relevant to mainstream culture--once a fringe, now in the spotlight. Even the New York Times is getting in on the phenomenon.

Coming from the perspective of a Literature focus in my post-high school education, I have become interested in the particulars of trying to define the role of podcasting in the various canonical rolls of history. Does a primarily sonic medium belong in the same list as Proust, Kafka and Yeats? I submit that Podcasting belongs in a separately-defined subcategory of the post-modern bibliography, as it has the potential to take the movement in directions never before conceived by those august masters of hexameter and open lines.

Post-modernism steps back from the podium of narrator telling a story and brings the focus on how the story is told, often eschewing the presence of a definable author altogether. It can be disjointed or told from multiple perspectives, all gathering threads of the same story like Joyce, or seemingly schizophrenic and disconnected, as the stories of Kafka, with his character Joseph K. awakening an outsider, but with no concrete tension against which to struggle, lost in a carefully-ordered void until his execution, devoid of meaning.

However, to use Podcasting to define Postmodernism would necessarily be stripping it of the postmodern title and reducing it to an easily-definable box, able to be shelved in the rank and files. Postmodernism is necessarily fluid and amorphous, but that is not to say it is chaotic and splintered; rather the term "rough-hewn" would be closer to an accurate description--often carefully crafted, but at its best resembling a sketch in the New Yorker magazine--every line meaningful but seemingly offhand, while poking fun at its very existence as a warped reflection of the real world.

Podcasting can be a wonderful underground voice of the people, a digital Radio Free Geek, if you will, or it can be a mindless babble of sonic assault by people with nothing to say and much time to say it in, the gamut ranging through those whom "the best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." We do love our spectacle, but wading through the endless morass of Podcasts from anyone with a microphone and a broadband line can be a daunting task; always hoping the next segment will be the revelatory decree, the one that makes a difference in your life, the transmission for which digital communication was invented, the one that transcends the medium and becomes the Next Big Thing. I just hope that Godot comes soon...

With typical Microsoft aplomb, the long-suffering, overdue-to-the-point-it-became-an-Apple-joke, feature-creeping but filesystem-less operating system Longhorn has been renamed Microsoft Vista in an attempt to deflect growing consumer criticism of the oft-extended release date of the next big thing from the Redmond, WA-based software giant. Microsoft has promised a beta by August 3 of this year, and so, following their track record for release dates, it should be ready for testing next February.

In a strangely Apple-like presentation (minus rock gods U2), Brian Valentine, senior Microsoft VP of the Core Operating System division announced the switch to thousands of cheering corporate cube-dwellers.

The new tagline is to be "Bringing Clarity to your World," a reflection of the increase in information workload to be managed. Greg Sullivan, a group product manager in the Windows client division stated that Vista is to be a tool used in organizing the flood of 'stuff' to help “bring clarity,” “so you can focus on what matters to you." Sounds like the waters are muddy enough without adding corporate rhetoric to further cloud the issue. Does this mean Vista will suddenly make bizarre error messages and plugins and constant security updates go away? Or does it just mean that all that will be done in the background so that the average user won't be allowed to see how full of holes and patches and bailing wire the system really is? It's kinda like gift-wrapping a Rube Goldberg device.

But then again, computing for most of us isn't so much about how it gets done as much as it is about whether or not it gets done. This often means keeping up on patches, plugins, updates, Service Packs and drivers, and that's just the basic operating system—then you have the application-specific updates and drivers and patches, and then there's the hardware add-ons and the drivers for them. I spend a lot of time railing about how Apple is so much easier to use due to the fact that everything is written for one particular hardware setup, and so is simple and optimized, whereas Microsoft has to contend with custom setups created by everyone from the neighbor's kid with a new graphics card to the uber-geek down the cube aisle who built his computer from spare mousetrap parts and a coat hanger (and it's still faster than yours...). All in all, the fact that it all runs as well as it (mostly) does is enough for a pat on the back. Hopefully, the new incarnation will be easier for the average user to utilize so their constant influx of stuff can be "clarified." I suppose we could all use a little clarity in our lives, but I'll still wait for the first Service Pack... [Britt Godwin]

Speculation has been crowding the rumor mills and Mac websites recently regarding a video playback device supposedly in development, a sort of iVid, or vPod if you will. I have no doubt that Jobs has tricks up his sleeve addressing this particular issue and is just waiting for his trademark, "oh, and one more thing" line to drop it on us, his semi-suspecting audience. This is backed up by both Apple's drive to begin selling music videos on its iTunes Music Store service, as well as the refusal of all 5 major music labels to comment on the issue. Often, a refusal to comment can be more darning evidence than any comment could be.

However, I don't see a dedicated video playback device in Apple's future. For one, they can't afford to develop the technology and a whole new device, only to realize mediocre sales. Similar products like the iRiver are not exactly taking the world by storm. The Sony PSP is primarily a gaming device and can be used to play movies, but will never take the place of a home theater system. On the road, in the car with nothing better to do, maybe. I'll still bring my laptop to watch a movie in the car, however. I don't even watch movies on my computer, because even a 17" CRT is too small to get the full effect, and this issue is why I believe the speculation is wrong. Music doesn't have to have a screen to be enjoyed, just a pair of headphones. Video playback on the other hand is a medium where the mantra, "Bigger is better" definitely holds true. Watching a blockbuster movie on a 2" screen, no matter how cool the device is, is not going to convince me to drop 299 hard-earned dollars on a gadget. That is not to say Apple is not going to put out a video-screen iPod for watching music videos, but with Jobs' characteristic reticence, he will wait to see if the video store explodes before committing his precious resources to such a shaky venture. It would be a foolish investment from a purely business standpoint, as cost analysis would be no more than speculation, something his board of directors have historically been loath to embrace. They got rid of him once for being too radical, and although recently he is the prodigal CEO, he still answers to his stockholders, and until he can show them the money, a vPod will remain on the drawing board. [Britt Godwin]

With the 500,000,000th song sold through the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), it should be fairly obvious to the movie and music industries that this is the model to use. It's fast, cheap and nearly instant with a good connection, and let's face it-most pirates are on broadband. Who's going to wait 8 days to download even a divx movie on dial-up? That is assuming the connection doesn't get dropped, etc. However, starting a download on broadband, even a fairly large one, then letting it run for a couple hours while you run errands, do housework or go to bed is what any of us usually do with a large file or software update anyway. When I download a file from Fileplanet or a similar gaming site, sometimes they run in the vicinity of 500 MB or more. I just start it, set my power settings to "always on," turn off the monitor and go do something else for a while.

The argument that the quality of the video is substandard and unacceptable is for all practical purposes, rather pointless, as I have seen some downloaded divx burns that are indistinguishable from commercial DVD's on an average TV. Watching them on the computer, it's an academic point. The technology is out there, and if some script kiddie can rip The Matrix well enough to look really good and fit on a VCD, imagine what the movie industry could do with all their technology.

With hard disk space becoming cheaper and the cost of disc media becoming laughably diminutive (200 CD-R's at Costco for under $20 recently), it would be a simple matter to browse Amazon.com or Blockbuster, select a movie and buy it for a nominal fee. Perhaps $5 to download a high-quality rip that will fit on a standard DVD? I know the cost of the physical pressings is virtually nothing and the most of the price of a $20 DVD goes to pay some kind of fee to everyone but me and a guy down the street, but if the industry is serious about stopping piracy, they have to make it the lowest common denominator-make it easier, better quality and reliable for an attractive price, and people will follow the path of least resistance. Blockbuster has already instituted their "No more late fees" model-how about never having to visit the store again? What happens if they don't have the movie that you really wanted to see? "Sorry-that was rented out earlier today, and with the new policy, it could be out for 2 weeks." Out-of-print, independent and foreign films could be made available, vastly increasing the audience and exposing a middle-class kid in Oklahoma to the struggles of a Nepalese yak caravan in Nepal's first Academy Award nomination for "Caravan." A friend of mine just downloaded a comedy sketch of a popular comedian that has since gone out of print. A generous uploader ripped his or her copy and provided it to a fellow fan who would ordinarily not be able to procure it, legally or otherwise.

For an industry that can make us fear Aliens in space, believe that dinosaurs have returned through genetic manipulation, follow the adventures of Indiana Jones and make us worry we are all being used like batteries in a digital dream world, why is a viable sharing model so hard to visualize? Piracy will continue until it is easier and more convenient not to. Maybe a limited trial program would be in order? We have to try something-arresting little girls for file-sharing is a sign of desperation and irrational reaction, much like a caged animal-nowhere to turn, but the key is in their hands nonetheless. What can it hurt? Astoundingly-overpaid bubble-world actors may get a few pennies less from royalties? My heart bleeds. They're not getting anything with piracy right now anyway... [Britt Godwin]

Sony recently released their iPod Shuffle-sized Network Walkman NW-E507 to cheers of roughly 3 people. The makers of the console-gaming dominant leader Playstation2 and the previously paradigm-defining Walkman cassette and CD players have joined the pack valiantly, if vainly trailing behind Apple's line of culturally-iconic iPod line.

Sony has been long known for high-quality consumer electronics, showing steady profits in Audio/Video (excepting, of course the ill-fated Betamax in the 1970's), home electronics, digital cameras and camcorders, console and handheld gaming and computers with the solid, if unexceptional Vaio line.

The new Network Walkman, already doomed by a name apparently thought up by the development engineers and passed over by Sony's normally-excellent marketing department, boasts up to 50 hours of playback between charges, but it seems that is the main advantage to this tiny player. The form factor is similar to the Shuffle, about the size of a 5-stick pack of Juicy Fruit, and comes with a solid pair of earbud headphones. So far, so good. The next interesting selling point of the Network Walkman is that it contains an integrated FM tuner. As the exponential increase in both Podcasting and satellite-based radio is indicating, FM may be going the way of the cassette tape. A Sirius or XM radio tuner could have been a better-conceived value-added conception; besides, isn't the point of a music player that one doesn't need to listen to broadcast commercials... oops--I mean, music?

Capacity is a respectable 1 GB (approximately 600 songs at 128-bit .mp3 encoding), and with the vaunted battery life, contains enough music to stun a Muse. The days of the 64 MB players is hopefully long gone, as they and their 32 MB and even 128 MB kin were doomed from the start.

Form factor is acceptable, battery life is superb, and the navigation system is one up on the Shuffle with an LCD display and the ability to navigate through a folder system rather than just hit “random play” and hope for the best. Score 1 for the NE, no-- NW-ER5734-something-or-rather; no, that's not right either... Walkman Network thingy.

Now for the down side(s): the 1 GB flagship model retails for $299, $170 more than the 1 GB iPod Shuffle. Granted, the LCD and the FM tuner are neat, but worth $170? One (1) Oops. Next comes the file formats supported—first, the iPod Shuffle, with .mp3, AAC (protected and non-), .m4b (audiobook), Audible formats 2, 3, and 4 and WAV, and these are for both Mac and Windows, and work seamlessly with the iTunes Music Store, the largest and most successful (legal) audio download method in history. And here comes the challenger: supported are .mp3. WMA and WAV and ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus (huh?). In a recent study, ATRAC3 turned out the worst in sound quality of any of the leading sound compression formats. And no iTunes Music Store support, meaning that to utilize the iTMS, one would have to download, then re-encode into .mp3—possible, but a pain in the tail. Or one could use the Connect music store, run by Sony, but it only supports Internet Explorer 5.5 and up. Is anyone actually still using Internet Exploder for anything? Point to the Shuffle.

No iTMS support, no support of AAC, great battery life, dubious distinction of FM tuner and fantastically ill-considered price point, when for $50 less, one could pick up a 6 GB iPod Mini, and no official Apple support—go get the iPod mini and spend the extra $50 on tunes! Keep trying, Sony... [Britt Godwin]

As much fun as this high-tech, processor-intensive electronic lifestyle is, sometimes a break in the action is healthy, both for physical and mental health. Personally, I think I could play video games (Desert Combat, anyone?) all day and all night, with breaks only for ingress and egress of fuel. I'm flying a bit under the radar with this particular article to bring your attention back to the world of print media. And no, I don't mean a discussion of ink-jet cartridges. I know you're disappointed. Maybe later. Anyway, with the summer in full swing, getting outside with a good book is one of the great pleasures of life in the Northwest, as we appreciate sunny summer days perhaps more than those in climes blessed with fewer clouds. I have recently been introduced to a British writer who has been swiftly making a name for himself through not only print, but graphic novels and guest writing for comics such as prior issues of the recent (appalling) screen adaptation of Hellblazer, featuring the magical rake (in the literary sense, not the garden tool...) Constantine, a dark comic well worth seeking out. Neil Gaiman has put out several novels, most successful commercially and critically, but none I feel as good as his tour de force rendition of a second London, a vaguely medieval society populated by all manner of strange and unique creatures, many of them dangerous and base. This work, titled Neverwhere, is a classic Gaiman work, evoking a feeling of a dreamlike state throughout, never waking the reader, rather dipping in and out of a fugue like a dolphin on painkillers. Before I lose you, intrepid reader, in the dim corridors of your local library, take heart; for this masterwork has also been brought into the digital realm with a DVD adaptation by the BBC. Unlike most adaptations of books, this one features Gaiman at the helm, ensuring an accurate creation of his dream. As the book is necessarily concerned with the non-corporeal imagery of each particular reader, seeing the book in a concrete format is slightly jarring, but does as well as any adaptation I have ever seen at maintaining the author's vision. Both the book and DVD can be found at the Issaquah Public Library, and both come highly recommended for a needed break of eyes and mind from the comforting glow of a CRT. Now, back to Desert Combat and my Apache Hellfire Delivery System!!!

The modification ("mod") for the popular game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas called "Hot Coffee" apparently takes otherwise (granted, highly) suggestive, but not graphic sex scenes (part of the deep gameplay of the popular game involving dating various cast members) and, shall we say, fills in the missing pieces. The conservative junket, among them rabid Christian right-wingers and various members of Congress eager to make a name for themselves have latched onto this particular mod as a lance in the fight against indecency and protecting our delicate children from the disgusting and corrupting reality of the outside world.

Rockstar Games, the publisher of the long-running and highly controversial game series has taken no responsibility for the modification of their code, as it is a third-party modification that takes advantage of a coding loophole. The question then becomes, how far is a company liable or responsible for modifications made without its knowledge to a product? I believe any sane person would agree that if the loophole is unintentional, then the company cannot be held liable. No one is forcing the download and installation of anything, and if a person is playing a game as steeped in relative morality and over-the-top fantasy as GTA: San Andreas, it is already far too late to call out the holy rollers.

I won't be so cliched as to suggest that this mod is covered under the free speech amendment, for perhaps it is, but I'm not going to debate that here. I will however wonder at the furor being raised over this bit of code-I agree that this mod is not for those gamers lacking the skills to separate fiction from reality, and agree that it should be kept out of the hands of those too young and impressionable to distinguish an over-the-top fantasy like GTA:SA, but I would place the onus squarely upon parents or guardians to take responsibility to regulate this kind of activity, as this mod is arguably no worse than what is seen on an average night of TV, and if a child is too young to see these kinds of things, what is he/she doing playing a game like this to begin with?

I am a gamer. I suppose that's somewhat like admitting to any other addiction, just a little less serious. BF:1942 Anonymous? I have spent more time shooting, fixing, allocating, running and dodging in a plethora of virtual worlds than I have spent doing nearly anything else in my life, and it's close to the time I have spent sleeping. Anyone remember Gemstone Warrior on the Apple IIe? I didn't think so. Ok, how about asteroids on the Mac Classic, run in OS 6?

That was back when games were an afterthought, a star on the horizon, out-shone by the business applications so necessary to sell the emerging technology to the corporate world with their risk analysis and labor unit quotas. Small companies made a couple games here and there, hoping to sell enough to break even on the relatively expensive cost of media. Games written in BASIC (aack!), With Color! for those lucky enough or wealthy enough to afford that level of hardware.

And with that segue into the discussion of hardware, I will once again touch on the subject of this article: Star Wars: Battlefront has gone Gold Master. Mac gamers will rejoice, but PC gamers will nod, yawn and go back to their Battlefield: 2 multiplayer havoc. We Mac gamers have been barking about this issue for years, that games are written for PC's and if we're lucky, the successful ones (read: money) are then ported to the Mac. We have been lucky enough to receive the bounty of a few intrepid and talented houses, notably Bungie, with their groundbreaking Pathways into Darkness and Marathon series, and Blizzard with their Mac and PC-compatible Diablo discs.

Even fewer are truly compatible with online play in arenas accessible by PC users as well, and let's not even get into mods-Battlefield: 1942's most excellent Desert Combat mod still doesn't have a stable Final release, whereas the next game in the series is already out on shelves and being snatched off Walmart shelves nationwide.

I look forward to this shift to Intel as a boon to we gamers, who have suffered so long under the "no, there's no Mac version yet" malaise, ridiculed by our PC brethren. Soon, we will have the technology to go with these twitchy trigger fingers to rise and over the barrel of a minigun say, "do you feel lucky, punk?"

In its upcoming August issue, MacWorld's cover article is about the Apple switch to Intel hardware. Now, being a respected industry source of news, MacWorld is expected to weigh in with its own article and opinions, but hasn't this Mac-Tel thing gone a little too far? This shouldn't be any greater an issue than the previous hardware changes Apple has gone through in its history, and should be easier than most, as Apple has once again characteristically planned ahead, developing parallel versions of X since 10.1 and providing a translation program, Rosetta, that promises to be even easier than running Classic.

What I see this as is a resistance to change--admittedly, lack of change is comfortable and predictable. However, if there is one constant, one mantra sung from the rooftops of 1 Infinite Loop Drive, Cupertino, CA, it is that change is good. Apple is the undisputed leader in innovative devices and programs for that one reason. Jobs has shown consistently that he is willing to do what is necessary to keep Apple innovating, changing, and by example, leading his company and the personal computer industry, taking it in directions it had never seen. Take the letter "I," for example--you can't throw a mouse without hitting something that starts with i: ipod, iTrip, iLife, iBook.

Yes, this is a major change for those involved in the hardware side, and even a few in the software development arena, but for the vast majority of us, it's just another upgrade;better, faster, more capable. Heck, nobody saw the Keynote speech climax coming--we all thought it was a G5...

Until Jobs goes to work for Microsoft, I will continue to do what has made we Mac users the force we are; leaders who know that eventually everyone else will do what we learned long ago: Think Different.

Download NeoOffice/J

Dear readers-I'm sure this will come as a revelation to you, but I have decided to defy popular opinion and reveal publicly that I am not, in fact, omniscient. I'll wait for the collective gasp of shock and disbelief.

In a previous article lauding the virtues of the AbiWord word processing program (which I will continue to use, despite the occasional odd graphical glitches), an alert and astute reader has brought it to my attention that one of my statements was in error. This kind gentleman has delivered good news not only to myself, but to all in the Mac community by revealing the presence of a native OS X distribution of OpenOffice. (Pause for ooohs and aaahs).

The native distro is called NeoOffice/J (for Java) and is available for free (yes, free under the GPL license, i.e. make changes all you want, but you can't make money from them) by setting your course at Warp 10 for the download site of planamesa and then waiting the appropriate amount of time (approx. 120 MB download). Install is fast and simple (it IS on OS X, after all) and pops up on 10.4.1 quick and clean. Bear in mind, however (I've said it before and I'll say it again...): not only is this on a computer, and therefore not carved in stone, but it is also a work in progress and may not be perfectly stable. If you want stable, cuneiform on clay tablets works pretty well, but they're hard to email.

That said, NeoOffice/J works beautifully. It is definitely apparent that the port came from a Windoze version, as the Preferences menu selection is present, but doesn't actually do anything. For prefs, navigate to the Tools menu, then down to Options. While backups and saving are fresh in our minds, make sure when starting NeoOffice/J to go to the aforementioned Options menu, then to the Load/Save expansion box and turn on Autosave every (xx) minutes. Why this option isn't on by default is interesting, but for now, my theory is that the intrepid porters overlooked it. Hmmmm, that may mean they're not omniscient either... What a horrifying thought! But for the rest of you, since you already know what I'm going to say, I'll leave you with this:

[Britt Godwin]

The alleged author of the notorious Sasser virus has been arrested and is now on trial in the German town of Verden, accused of causing $157,000 worth of damage to government property, as well as additional charges of illegally altering data and computer sabotage. Sven Jaschan was turned in by a school classmate, no doubt influenced not by justice, but by the quarter of a million dollar reward offered by Microsoft. The Sasser worm is one of the most destructive and persistent computer virus attackers ever, accounting for well over half of all virus activity on the Internet in 2004, along with another bit of code also authored by Jascher (the Netsky virus) and continues to be a threat, albeit a decreasing one as the vulnerability is patched. Unfortuanately, there are thousands of computer users unaware of the threat still, and blind to the techniques necessary to seal the hole. The virus exploited the Windows LSASS security service, hence the name.

As Jaschan was 17 at the time the virus was distributed, he is being tried as a juvenile and will escape the maximum penalty of 5 years, as well as falling under the provision that the trial be held behind closed doors.

Apparently, the German government and Microsoft were among the last to know, as the German security firm Securepoint hired Jaschan for a "certain know-how" regarding electronic security. The contract details are unknown, but this sends a clear message to script kiddies everywhere: Whoever does the most damage gets a contract. Hell of a resume...

Download AbiWord

Refraining from software piracy isn't always easy. It requires a bit more in the way of effort to track down effective solutions that don't infringe upon copyright violation somehow. Luckily, the options in word processing are fairly extensive. OpenOffice is a great alternative that also allows your conscience a well-deserved break. The problem is, as of this writing, OpenOffice on the Mac is fuzzy, at best. And I do mean fuzzy. It runs using the X11 framework, and so lacks the polish of a native app, which also apparently extends to the graphics display therein. If there are any Mac coders out there, please help the OpenOffice team--this is a great product that deserves all the help it can get.

In the meantime, less well-known but by no means inferior comes the AbiWord program, a full-featured word processor for Mac, Linux and even Big Brother. I have since left MS Word gathering dust somewhere in a dark crack of my drive and have taken to AbiWord like a geek to coffee.

The interface is familiar to any who have used either OpenOffice or MS Word, with similar toolbars and even tear-off palettes containing formatting options. A particularly nice feature is the ability to save documents in nearly any format, from the .abw format of AbiWord, to .doc, OpenOffice's .sxw, .rtf, and a couple I didn't even recognize. Suffice it to say that you'll be able to open it from wherever you may find yourself. Perhaps the best part, though is the extremely small distribution size--less than 10 MB, allowing it to be run from a flash drive if necessary, and making it easy to carry all your particular settings and idiosyncratic macros with you anywhere.

The single glaring omission in this polished composition is a dictionary/thesaurus. Granted, this would increase the size of the download considerably, but as the program itself is only 10MB uncompressed, the inclusion of a dictionary and thesaurus would still keep the program to a very manageable size, even for running off a flash drive. Luckily, OS X Tiger has included a Dictionary widget, and AbiWord also comes with the built-in (easily with a right-click, no less) ability to search both Google and Wikipedia for highlighted text, nearly compensating for the lack of dictionary/thesaurus capability.

The open source community has given the world enough freeware and donation-ware that using pirated software shouldn't really be a necessity for anyone, no matter how it is justified, and AbiWord is a shining example of that. Download it today and drop MS Word forever. [Britt Godwin]

I believe it is a central tenet of being a geek (and you know who you are) that there is some inner voice that insists, if it can be modded to somehow work better or faster or stronger, it must be so. There is an imperative that won't allow us to just use things as they are. Your particular voice and comfort level may vary, but I have just re-affirmed that voice in my own head by modifying a Nerf gun. Yes, I have been discontent to leave well enough alone and have taken a stock Nerf Maverick and made it into a weapon truly to be feared in Nerf warfare.

For those unaware of these little beauties, a Maverick is a 6-shot revolver-type single-action, single-shot handgun. It reminds this old Mac fan of the .44 handgun in Bungie's venerable Marathon games. AHA! Durandal has NOTHING on Nerf!!! Now all we need is a Nerf double-barrelled shotgun... Hmmmmm....

And so, on a Sunday afternoon I took it upon myself to make the already-formidable weapon into a high-powered Equalizer. (I know what you're thinking--was that 5 sticky darts or 6?). After working on Toshiba laptops (fondly known as T(ons)O(f)S(crews)-hiba, this should be a walk in the park.

The gun splits into 2 shells after removal of 10 screws (making sure it's not cocked, of course) and reveals a fairly simple mechanism. A large spring is compressed, and when released by the trigger, drives a piston-like cylinder forward and the resulting compressed air blows the foam dart out of the short barrel. Removing the spring and pulling it until it is stretched another 2 inches or so increases the travel when released, giving a moderate increase in range and dart velocity. However, as the metal possesses a "memory" of sorts, after a few shots, it returns to more or less its original dimensions. Next, I'm going to try to find a suitable (stronger) spring at Home Depot and see what happens. By the way, the usual applies. Don't try this at home.

Apple has once again jumped into the forefront of the emerging-technology wave with Podcasting support for its popular iTunes music player program. With its familiar iTunes Music Store interface, selecting a free podcast is as simple as buying songs. With one click of a button, iTunes will not only subscribe to the 'cast, but download the latest edition of the selected podcast as well as a list of past 'casts, complete with short blurbs detailing the contents of each segment.

Rival software giant Microsoft finds itself lagging in the podcasting arena, already embarrassed by its attempt to play catch-up with the announcement of RSS support in the upcoming Longhorn operating system, not due until late 2006 or early 2007. Apple's Safari web browser has contained integral RSS reader support since just prior to the release of the innovative company's 4th major OS release in as many years, and has maintained a finger on pulse of rising tech trends.

Mac users can upgrade to the new version of iTunes (4.9) using the Software Update link in the Apple menu or System Preferences pane of OS X, or by navigating to www.apple.com/iTunes for the direct download. Windows users can check for updates to the software by using the automatic update function in Preferences or by following the aforementioned link.

Podcasts on nearly any topic can be found by navigating through the hierarchical structure of iTunes Music Store, or users searching for particular casts such as Podcast pioneer Adam Curry's Daily Source Code can use the search window function in the iTunes Music Store, the same as searching for a particular tune. Downloading to an iPod is identical to music as well, as a podcast can be dragged and dropped directly into a playlist set up on the iPod.

RSS and Podcasting support--can a lyrics database be far behind? One thing is certain--Apple is the company to watch for now. 'Cast off! [Britt Godwin]

I have dipped my toes into the frigid waters of Penguin-world, and as I suspected, I can't swim. Being a long-time Mac fan, with occasional forays into Windows, I have never felt the need to explore Linux or even the venerable command-line interface format. However, with the increasing noise from the open-source community about stability, ease of use and straight geek cred, I decided that I would abandon the warm blanket of OS X and see what the fuss is about. I decided to start with a relatively user-friendly version of Debian called Ubuntu. With the KDE GUI, it becomes Kubuntu. As a bonus, it runs on my Mac hardware, in this case a 600MHz G3 Snow iBook.

As a disclaimer up front, I have never been truly comfortable with command line or with instructions that look like gibberish (who are the Gibbers, anyway? Is it really Gibberese?), spelling commands that only a computer could love. An example: in my attempt to install Firefox (more on this later), it instructed me to run the install script through the Terminal. Ok, I've used the Terminal in OS X; how hard can it be? Famous last words aside, the command looked something like this: make install (ok, got it) -d grep -l -justinstallthedangthingalready/-man/whattheheckisamakefileanyway. That wasn't so hard—but it returns "directory is a directory but cannot install" or something like that. So after all this, I return to the Konqueror web browser and look up instructions for installing Firefox for something I may have overlooked. Come to find out that Kubuntu is an all-inclusive distribution and doesn't support anything that didn't come from the initial install or a short list of supported programs developed by Ubuntu. Guess what? Firefox isn't among them, even though it is a native Linux program. Hm. Ok. Would have been nice to know that from the start.

However, in Kubuntu's defense, it is a fairly complete and polished distro with a good set of included software like OpenOffice, an RSS reader and a full suite of multimedia software (although the CD-burning program needs work). Bonus feature: Kubuntu is compiled to work on Apple hardware. In fact, this article is being written using OpenOffice on my iBook. It doesn't necessarily support all the keys on an iBook laptop, however, as my multifunction F keys for controlling brightness, volume, and, inexplicably, my CD-ROM eject key are all disabled, reverting back to the single F-key functions.

All in all, if you have an old spare computer lying around and would like to see what Linux is all about, Kubuntu could be a good dip into the waters. Otherwise, in my humble opinion, Linux in any form has a long way to go to catch up to the ease of use and professional polish of OS X. [Britt Godwin]

Verdict: Tiger eats Penguin

So after a stunning weekend of hiking here in the Pacific Northwest I have once again retreated back to the comforting glow of my CRT. I have recently brought another old friend into the family of Macs I have at the house through the generosity of a mac-using couple of my acquaintance. An AGP-Graphics, "Sawtooth" G4 400Mhz with a DVD-RAM and internal Zip100 is now keeping my iBook and G5 company.

My ultimate goal is to set up a RAID 1 array, with (2) XX-GB hard drives in a striped array. Not for backup, but as a file/media server. Using a striped array rather than mirrored is inherently more dangerous, as you are effectively doubling the chance of losing all your data from a HDD failure, but it is so much faster on an older machine like this that it makes it worth the extra risk, especially considering I do make regular backups using the DVD-RW that came with my G5. Really.

Having started the machine from the OS X "Tiger" DVD volume, I proceed to create a RAID 1 array using (2) 30 GB disks I have in the shop. This is accomplished through the Disk Utility application, located under the pull-down menu in the install screen. Clicking on the RAID tab, I select a striped array and drag my 2 disks to the window. Do I really, *really* want to do this and erase everything on these disks? Sure. Verification and partitioning successfully complete, and Voila! RAID 1, ready to go. Now for the install. Straightforward, except now the install location is a multiple-disk icon, representing the new RAID array. I never did understand why Windows had to do the "push F6....................NOW!toolate. Sorry--reboot and try again" rigamarole when it was that easy on a Mac. Oh, well. And now for the install. Please hold--this article will return in 11 minutes...

Install successful, and reboot. Uh, oh. Taking waaaay to long for the spinning fan icon to start. Post-install cleanup? Nope. Black screen with a flickering "disk2: media not found" error. AAAAAARRRGGHHH!!! Bad Hard Drive! Sit! Stay! Play Dead! Oh, wait... it is. Pull the drive and reinstall... and it works. I am now on a quest for a 30 GB drive. Next comes the saga of networking it so it can be accessed from the Worldwide Net rather than just my personal network. Until then, fellow Mac fans: Think Intel!

Download 3D-Space VFS

Did you ever wish you could just dispense with the hierarchical file structure in your computer and just lay everything out where you can see it? You can--it's called 3D-Space VFS. Try saying that 3 times fast... Anyway, 3D-Space VFS opens up a virtual 3D space in a window, displaying shortcuts (default setting--can be customized) to all the basic apps and utilities on your Mac. This has the effect of a virtual desktop with all your stuff on one zoomable, draggable tabletop spread out before you. No more wondering which tree a file is in--even with the power of Spotlight (or even better--Quicksilver), it's hard to search for a file when you don't remember what it's called, but you KNOW you just had it...

3D-Space VFS expands desktop real estate drastically, since the effect creates less of a true 3-D architecture and more of an overhead, expanded 2-D plane. Put little green creatures on it and it would feel like World of Warcraft or Diablo. The only real drawback to the system is that navigation through the file structure needs refinement, as it is necessary to right-click, then select a cascading menu item to go up a level. Counter-intuitive and a surprising overlook in an otherwise visionary (get it?) program.

Perhaps in a later incarnation 3D-Space VFS will come into its own and develop a more efficient set of navigation controls, but for now, download it and play with the trial version, if only to get a taste for where the future of browsing is headed. {For: OS X $29.00} [Britt Godwin]

Or something like that. So, loyal Mac users--we're all aware of the podcasting phenomenon by now; the proprietor of this very site has done a thorough article that can be mostly translated directly into the true computing world of the Mac system. But once you've found a great Podcast, say through the Widget Podcast Shuffle, the question becomes, now what does one do with the link? You have the option of downloading and installing and registering, a program, since we're all legit here, of which there are quite a few good ones such as iPodderX or Podder, both for OS X, but there is an easier way, albeit not as flashy an iterface, but not only free but already built into your Mac. With Steve Jobs' announcement of Podcast support built into a near-future version of iTunes, it is a great stopgap measure as well until the official iTunes release. It's the RSS feed reader built into the Safari browser.

For several revisions recently of its included browser, Apple has seen fit to include a full-featured RSS decoder into Safari (and if you have Tiger, which you really should by now, check out the RSS screensaver in the System Preferences/Desktop & Screensaver pane). What is even better is that you can listen to Podcasts through that RSS reader by the simple expedient of pasting the link (which should be an .xml link resembling this link to The Chris Pirillo Show: http://www.thechrispirilloshow.com/subscriptions/mp3.xml) into the address bar and clicking "Go." This will open a new window or tab, depending on how yours is configured, with the familliar Quicktime audio bar, allowing you to play, rewind, and fast forward a Podcast. This is a great way to check out Podcasts to separate the messy dross from the minty floss before committing to downloading and subscribing to each one, then having to go back and unsubscribe and erase all the old 'casts. Quick, painless and eminently Mac. Happy 'CastSurfing! [Britt Godwin]

We've all seen the cases and jackets and protectors for the iPod--ranging from silicone form-huggers to fully-encasing aluminum armor that may just stop a small bullet. There are some great products out there, but none I have come across display the sleek whimsy of the ipod until now.

Speck Products has released the iGuy--a poseable, bendable anthropomorphic case for the 4th Generation (4G) iPods and iPod Photo (including the 20. 30, 40, and 60 GB models). The rubberized form provides protection for the body (get it?) of the iPod, while a clear plastic plate protects the screen. We still don't advise getting it wet, however.

There is a cutout for the plugs and hold button on top, but as the rubber body is so thick, using an add-on accessory like the ever-popular iTrip by Griffin Technology (www.griffintechnology.com/products/itrip/) would be impossible--a shared quirk of most protective solutions for the iPod.

When it is time to charge the iPod, the case hinges about where the bellybutton would be, opening up a slit in the back of the iGuy, allowing it to "sit" on the dock, and giving the odd impression of a person seated on a throne...

The bulk of the iGuy renders it impractical for carry in a pocket or similar conveyance, but it is designed primarily for a stationary location on a desk or in a car, which works rather well in a cupholder due to the poseability of the figure. This makes a great addition to a boring desk or home office, and at only $34.95, falls easily within the lower end of the iPod-accessory price range.

For serious but whimsical protection of your investment, the iGuy is capable and ready for duty. Can kung-fu Podding be far behind...? [Britt Godwin]

There's always a deep breath before a firmware update, be it motherboard or peripheral, but as any of us know who have performed one, if there is a squirrel-up in the process, the device is usually then a fairly expensive paperweight. This is the reason I have not used my Radeon 9600 Pro currently occupying a slot in my PC as a Mac add-in card. With a firmware update, it is one on a list of compatible models with Macs, but if I screw it up, I'm out my gaming card (a cheap one, but I write for a living, and it is a pretty good overclocker...) and the primary display for the PC, as the onboard graphics on my motherboard is barely adequate at best.

The reason I'm getting ready to run a firmware hack is that the Pioneer 107D DVD-RW drive that came with my Mac is restricted to only 4x burn speed. Now the Windows retail version of this drive burns at 8x, and with a firmware hack has been shown to be reliable up to above 16x, if high-quality media like Ritek or TDK is used. Up at those speeds, though, don't whine if you burn a $1/disc coaster...

Why Apple chose to use such a conservative speed I can only guess at. Perhaps they'd rather restrict their hardware to a guaranteed reliability rate and sacrifice a bit of speed in the process? Maybe.

You are probably thinking, "why not just buy the retail version?" and you would have a valid question, as they are around $100--not exorbitant, and with the price of Dual-Layers getting ready to come down, it should get even cheaper. It's mainly due to the fact that we writers very rarely have a great deal of disposable income, and $100 is a lot of beer money. The way I figure it is that if the firmware flash goes well (it's Mac-native, even!), I am now in possession of a peripheral that is twice as fast as what I had before--perpetuating the never-ending chase for bigger, better, faster, more. If I blow it, my wife will make me fix it, and that'll justify buying the next model up, and I'm good to go. In the doghouse for a few days, but everything will work out fine eventually. Right? Anybody?

(If the surgery goes well, there will be a part 2 to this article--If I blow it, I won't be able to reach the computer from my chain in the doghouse, and so there will be no part 2, and I'll go back to reviewing gear and programs and stay away from the tinkering, even though that's the best part of being a geek...)

I found a program that gives the much-vaunted Spotlight a run for its money--it's called Quicksilver. Yes, I know that's a heck of a claim, but if someone at Apple isn't in talks with this development team, they need to be.

With a fast keystroke combination (default is Control-Space), it brings up an elegant input window, into which a few letters are typed, bringing up a list of matches. It works similarly to Spotlight, in which each successive character refines the list, but Spotlight is primarily a GUI, mouse-based search program, and useful in its own way. However, within 5 minutes of installing Quicksilver, I was ignoring Spotlight altogether. With a couple of keystrokes, I was navigating the labyrinthine depths of my hard drive with aplomb. I have begun to think of this program as the grown-up version of Spotlight, as it's got a very Apple-like style and ease of use. Installation is idiot-proof (evidenced by the fact that it was easy for me the first time), and offers to install various plugins for different applications. It even searches through Safari bookmarks. It is easily customizable, allowing searches through only some directories, limited or open through user-defined limits.

Quicksilver's input pane allows various actions to be executed when a file is found, from merely opening it with the appropriate program, to attaching the file to an email directly, from which point another action pane will search your address book and display recipients' vCards for a 1-click compose-and-attach. Easy.

The preferences are near-infinitely-customizable, allowing for simple adding or subtraction of folders, directories or files, after the initial install scan of the hard drive, which takes surprisingly little time--nowhere near the run the first time Spotlight indexed (that felt like it took forever). Installing plugins is simply done from the preferences pane as well, listing the plugins available and downloading with a click. I installed everything in the initial setup, and the downloads of the various plugins took just a few seconds on a 1.5 Mbit DSL line--your mileage may vary, but it is well within the limits of a dial-up account.

Quicksilver can be somewhat of a memory hog at full throttle, but again, that is customizable through the prefs by turning on or off various graphical niceties, but with everything turned on and flashy, it took up 26MB of real resident memory and topped out at a burst access of 65MB, using a max CPU load of 14% on a dual 1.8 GHz G5 Tower. Response was as close to instant as it gets, even beating the response time of Spotlight. Again, your mileage may vary, but it can be tweaked to run on nearly any recent Mac.

Bottom line: if this isn't a part of your Mac toolkit, it should be, especially considering that it is donation-ware. It is still in a beta development, but this is one of the finest programs I have seen, beta or not. [Britt Godwin]

Download Quicksilver

So I'm going straight--from a life on the high seas of international Piracy to a life of mainstream legality. My wife asked me to stop pirating software due to the fact that it's wrong, but no less that the legal war has become more widely-publicized of late, stirring feelings of unease with her, and to tell the truth, with me as well. As slim as I feel the chances of actually being caught and prosecuted for software piracy may be, one lawsuit could ruin the life my wife and I have worked so hard to build these 8 years.

A quick run through my software library turns up about 30% of the programs from questionable sources, and of the others that weren't downloaded and cracked, most came with the operating system. And that's not counting the extensive downloads off of BitTorrent sites currently occupying hard disk space.

The problem with piracy is that it's so bloody easy, with very little chance of getting caught and prosecuted. That leads to the moral dilemma of Locke and Hobbes--are people inherently good and occasionally do bad things, or are people inherently bad and act good because they're forced to by society or fear of retribution? This article is too short to go into that debate, but an interesting test would be for those of you who are guilty of piracy in some form to try going completely straight for 1 month, and see what happens. If you are anything like me, you'll find it difficult, if not impossible to continue day-to-day operations in the digital sector. Cold turkey is obviously not the answer, but what is to be done? Every time a company tries to hack--proof their software, someone more clever than they hacks it again. There will always be someone out there more clever than the people who try to secure something, and so the answer leads down the slippery slope of making penalties more severe until we're chopping off heads for cracking a program.

What I believe will help stem the tide is a campaign to put faces with programs--remind people that the guys who wrote most of the programs out there are geeks like us who found a problem and wrote a solution--sometimes doing this as a sole source of income for rent and food every month. It's often just one or two people in a basement or home office with a basic PC, and their wives are torqued because they are spending all their time coding to write a useful program. Can't we spare the $10 or whatever to help them do good for us?

There are many ways to be piracy-free, and most of them aren't all that hard, especially for us geeks out there that are good enough to be pirates in the first place. [Britt Godwin]

In his customary keynote address at the Apple World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs announced Apple's decision to migrate to Intel processors in their next generation of Macintosh computers. Two long-time supporters of the Mac platform announced full support for the move, strengthening the inevitable bridge necessary for such an integral shift. In a statement recently released by Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, he announced that, "we plan to create future versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac that support both PowerPC and Intel processors." Adobe similarly stepped up to the plate with their intentions to support the new hardware. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe said they also "plan to create future versions of our Creative Suite for Macintosh that support both PowerPC and Intel processors," thereby bringing to bat two heavyweight developers whom many smaller software houses look to for guidance.

This may be seen as somewhat of a vindication of a long-held belief among both Mac and PC teams that the hardware lineup of the Mac is the weakest part of an otherwise-successful system. In an ideal future, computer users would be able to run the same software on either system, regardless of the underlying hardware. This dream, already semi-realized through programs like Virtual PC and DarWine, may someday close the rift between the two rival systems, leading to a more user-friendly and effective partnership.

This shift has been rumored since Apple's Marklar project in 2002, with Apple developing an x86-based OS against a possible switch in the future and has remained in parallel development, with a culmination in the official rollout at the WWDC. The major shocker to many was that the entire Keynote Address was displayed using a 3.6GHz Pentium 4. [Britt Godwin]

Watch the 2005 WWDC Keynote Address

The war between file-sharing networks and the MPAA / RIAA juggernaut took a decided turn towards the Empire with a raid that shut down the tracker Elite Torrents. Elite Torrents showed up on the radar for posting the final Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith before the theater release. With the amount of money that the various companies involved have spent on advertising, product tie-ins, and totally unnecessary promotions, the Empire cannot afford an attack upon their profit margins by rivals pre-empting their cash cow. This sets an interesting precedent (that should be obvious in hindsight) in that it seems the bigger the hype surrounding a release, the more likely an upload is to be noticed and the tracker attacked. Squeaky wheels and all that.

The BT tracker sites are fighting back, however, as new programs are developed to take advantage of decentralized trackers, making it harder for an upload to be traced to a particular site. Plugins such as SafePeer for Azureus make detection more difficult as well by banning certain IP addresses known to be operated by MPAA / RIAA affiliates.

For the truly paranoid (or maybe those better equipped to read the writing on the wall), there are always the hard-core programs like WASTE, an encrypted, P2P program that requires a 128-bit decryption key, nigh-unbreakable and certainly out of the cost-benefit ratio of even the most well-funded film studio. Unfortunately, this method is far less accessible due to the demands of needing another user’s key, as well as a listing of files that user is making available, and the bandwidth necessary for an efficient transfer. If you are the kind of person who has many friends or acquaintances interested in this method, it can be worthwhile. Just remember: Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you…[Britt Godwin]

I recently came across a great program in my Mac-centric meanderings that promises to make short work of cataloging and organizing an extensive book collection. Called Booxter, published by Deepprose (www.deepprose.com), Booxter is as easy to use as iTunes, with the added benefit of filling in most of the relevant information fields for you, looking up genre, type, binding, and other useful information through a search of multiple sites, including Amazon.com and the U.S. Library of Congress.

The GUI is straightforward and simple, showing a column in the left-hand side of all the various libraries you create, much like the iTunes playlists. You can create just a library of your wife’s romances (you know you read them—admit it) or all the college textbooks that you’ve accumulated throughout the years. The main window contains a large-block table containing various fields, along with a shot of the cover of each book as a thumbnail. A very iTunes-like search field occupies the upper-right corner.

Double-clicking on the cover in the main window brings up a surprisingly-deep info window, with many of the fields already filled-in, but room for many custom fields and keyword or meta-tag spaces. Keyword and meta-tags? Would that happen to sync with the Spotlight in Tiger, you ask? Why, yes it does—Spotlight is able to find nearly any of the tags or fields you would like—searching for just Robert A. Heinlein books? Punch up Stranger in a Strange Land into the Spotlight box, and voila!—there is your entry.

The smart libraries can even be exported to a text file or to an iPod, for consultation or library-sharing on the go, making it useful for comparing libraries for book-swapping or even, using one of the fields provided, can be marked with a check for “Lent out” and lent to whom, as well.

Not looking forward to manually entering titles and ISBN #’s? Booxter supports barcode scanners and even firewire webcams like iSight for entering barcodes dozens at a time.

The best part of this comprehensive and eminently useful program is the ridiculously low price of only $14.99 from DeepProse.com and will make an indispensable addition to any home library. [Britt Godwin]

So Intel is shipping its much-vaunted Pentium D multi-core, high-speed, do-even-more-time-wasting-faster processors today. Do we really need more processors to do what we don't really need to do now? How many of us have set up our Media Center Edition Home Theater All-in-one Entertainment System to the degree that one of these chips would make any sort of real difference? Granted, I'm addressing a core audience of uber-geeks that can probably compile C++ while recording the latest episode of "American Idol," all while choosing whether to go with the Dark Side or the Light in Knights of the Old Republic 2. However, I feel that we are going the wrong direction in this race of better, faster, more, in that we have the processing capability we really need to do nearly anything we want. What we are failing to focus on is the user aspect of computing in general. When Apple, arguably the most user-friendly, multi-colored fruit-flavored marketing juggernaut in the world computer market, has to offer classes to teach users how to email their photos, there is a problem inherent in the system. What happened to the 1950's dreams of the future, dreams where computers did what we wanted them to, and did it with a calm, synthetic, "Compliance!" Ok, so maybe the robot intelligence from the "Flight of the Navigator" is a little off-center. However, off-center is preferable to off-target completely.

In technical jargon, the new chips promise to kick up performance another couple notches, taking the hyper-threading technology and replacing it with actual hardware cores. Most average users won't see much of a practical difference in performance from the older P4's, especially from the Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz / 1066FSB monsters, which remains the king of the Intel hill for a while, especially since relatively few programs are set up currently to take advantage of true multi-threading. Overclocking is supported, though, so when purchasing a new motherboard to accomodate the new chips, look for one with support for multipliers above 14x and Vcore adjustments, for those of you brave and willing enough to take the chance of frying your new toy. But then again, as soon as I can get one, I'm going to see what she'll do too, so--Gentlemen, start your BIOS! [Britt Godwin]

Folding@home

So you have a 3.8GHz P4 with 2GB of fast RAM and RAID'ed banks of huge Ultra 320 SCSI disks with a 4 Mbps Cable connection to the web, and what do you do with it but play games and surf the internet? There is a way to really show what she can do and contribute to a greater cause for the good of humankind. Folding@home is a distributed-computing project run by a team from Stanford University that is exploring how proteins fold and unfold in order to carry out their functions within the body. When these proteins fold or unfold wrong, problems occur such as cancer. The calculations needed for just one project used to take months on supercomputers, but with the combined processing power of all the PC's out there, they now have access to power literally thousands of times greater than a supercomputer can hope to achieve. Best of all, it uses processing time that would otherwise be wasted by computers sitting idle. The program doesn't take up cycles in the middle of World of Warcraft or UT2004--it only kicks in when the computer has been idle for a user-adjustable time period. Leave it on all night (which you do anyway, right?) and it'll run, then when you check your email in the morning, it'll go away, waiting for those idle cycles again. It's a clean program--no spyware, adware, or any other nasties, and it uninstalls in a second. Stanford is interested in your help for the greater good, not advertising sales. It even comes with a screensaver function so you can watch it work if you'd like. Download it at Folding@home and do something great with that hot rod. I'm folding--are you? [Britt Godwin]

Amongst my random ramblings over the web, I recently came across an offer for a free 2 GB hard drive. Now before you cry 'scam' and tar and feather me, this offer is open only to those with a Gmail email account. The reason for this is due to a little program called GmailFS, or more colloquially as the Gmail Drive Shell extension (say that three times fast...). This neat little tidbit creates a file system in concert with a Gmail account, effectively turning your Gmail mailbox into a network drive of 2 GB+ (as the Gmail team has been adding storage capacity to Gmail accounts (as of this writing, the capacity was at 2.218 GB and counting). I have been testing this program for the last week and found it to work beautifully, but of course, as a network drive, the faster your Internet connection, the faster the response.

GmailFS handles files essentially by turning them into attachments and sending them straight into the archived section of your Gmail account, which means that even if your network drive is offline, your files are accessible through Gmail's noted search function, just like any other email. GmailFS can be found at as a free download.

What's that, you say? You don't have a Gmail account because you don't know anyone who can invite you? We have a solution for that as well! isnoop.net is chock-full of kind-hearted souls just waiting to hand out their Gmail invites to those going without. Considering each Gmail account is now effectively a 2 GB+ network drive powered by Google, the time to grab this and make use of it is yesterday.

Standard boilerplate: This program is a beta. That means if it breaks or if Google decides to stop supporting it, it's nobody's fault. It's neat, but use it just like anything else computer-related: save early, save often, and in more than one place. [Britt Godwin]

For all the noises Toshiba is making about its HD DVD format, Sony is poised to take Blu-Ray the way of the VHS cassette and leave HD DVD to go the way of the Dodo. In a development near and dear to my own heart, Apple Computer was recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the Blu-Ray Disc Association, joining a majority of the heavyweights in the electronics industry like Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, as we all know, Apple is scarcely in a position to make an arbitrary decision as to which horse to back, so the choosing of sides by Apple is a telling move towards the future success of Blu-Ray. It already supports the H.264 HD video codec in QuickTime 7, smoothing the adoption of Blu-Ray into the software side of things.

However, of even greater moment than the venerated Apple decision is Sony’s move to support Blu-Ray in the upcoming PlayStation 3. With a good majority of the console market, this alone should be able to coax quite a few fence-sitters.

Although Toshiba and Sony have been engaged in talks recently regarding the consolidation of the two formats into one, analysts have speculated that they are both using the talks as a forum to attempt to get the other to capitulate.

In terms of branding, Toshiba can leverage the world-wide recognition of the “DVD” moniker in its HD DVD label, a mark familiar to millions already, leaving Blu-Ray the uphill battle to market the relatively-unknown brand. However, if everyone is using the Blu-Ray format anyway, branding will be less of a problem due to a cornered market to begin with. The public will get used to nearly any brand, but it has to work right and be competitive, or else it doesn’t matter whether you call it Blu-Ray or VHS. [Britt Godwin

Yes, Sony fans--the PS3 has been unveiled! With The Cell processor at 3.2 GHz pushing more than 2 Teraflops of processing goodness and more than the graphics capacity of 2 GeForce 6800 cards running at 1080p resolution, this is going to SCREAM! Gameplay issues and bizarre vehicular choices aside, anyone who saw the latest incarnation of the legendary Gran Turismo line (up to #4 now, quite an accomplishment in the fickle gaming world) is wondering how much more realistic can it really get before you need a full-motion simulator. The technology is there, sports fans, and Sony has shown their mettle in providing gamers with the best in console gaming time and time again. Sure, XBOX had Halo and Halo 2. You're still only halfway to the reign of the Gran Turismo series alone. Besides, any first-person shooter (FPS) fan knows that FPS' have to be played with a keyboard and mouse. Nintendo had a few games worth playing, but most of them, had they come out on PC, would have barely merited the time to play the demo and dump the file, never to be reinstated. Arguably, some of the greatest games ever have been the within the realm of the Playstation line, including the aforementioned Gran Turismo line, but also Grand Theft Auto 3, then Vice City, and now San Andreas, racking up rave reviews across the board.

Old-school gamers like me still find it awkward to manipulate the twin analog sticks, preferring the comfortable feel of the D-pad, but kudos to Sony for introducing pressure-sensitive buttons and high-quality analog sticks, without which Gran Turismo would have been just another racing clone (Ridge Racer, anyone?). Unless Microsoft leverages some of their vaunted resources into hiring edgy, fresh game designers, I predict Sony will rule the roost yet again, beginning in Spring 2006. Far too far away for many of us, however short the time may be... [Britt Godwin]

A recent study funded by Hewlett-Packard determined that when office workers were asked to multitask with email and phone tasks, their IQ dropped more than 10 points. If you're curious, that's approximately 4 points more than a person under the influence of marijuana, and a worse showing than even the effects of a full day of sleep deprivation. This should serve as a warning to the IT community, as we're obviously moving in the wrong direction--instead of more, faster, we should consider instead a philosophy espousing clear and focused. On applications, we all lie about our abilities to handle customer service and email and phone and requests from clients and co-workers and the boss and that last-minute assignment and oh, god there's another email and I'm almost done with this network config and I still have to run the setup.exe and why isn't the wireless connection working now... That way lies madness.

While the study proved to be a phony, there's truth in the message. Americans share a culture where we have stayed on top by working harder and longer and faster than anyone else, but we also have incredible suicide and burnout and divorce rates as well. I personally advocate following most of Europe's example and taking a month off for Carnival. Work your tail off for 11 months, then relax and realign during August or so. It's gotten to the point at which we're working so much that we can't afford to take time off to go on the vacations we've earned. This is not a trend that can be reversed overnight--as long as corporations are focused solely on the bottom line, the workers will suffer. We use technology to enhance and enrich our lives, but it has become our master. Paradoxically, the solution is to do fewer tasks at once, thereby concentrating more fully on the task at hand and increasing efficiency. Do less, faster. Can you hold on for a minute? I have to get this email... [Britt Godwin]

The wide, wonderful world of widgets has spawned a near-indispensable one for those of us here in the Seattle area. The widget is named "Seattle Traffic" and simply and elegantly connects a Dashboard-equipped (Tiger) computer to the Washington State Department of Transportation Traffic checker Website, so that with one hotkey, you can check the traffic conditions from Auburn to just shy of the Mukilteo Ferry. As this site is updated every 90 seconds, it provides a real-time look at traffic conditions along any major route in the Seattle and surrounding areas.

Coupled with a second, less elegant but still useful tool, the Yahoo! Traffic widget shows construction sites and scheduled stoppages and blocks for any major traffic region you'd like (subject to those blocks being reported to the Yahoo! database, albeit remarkably comprehensive, to be fair). As we all know traffic can change violently in the course of just a few minutes, having the latest traffic reports can mean the difference between being stuck or being on time. And, as an added bonus, who wants to listen to the insipid morning radio shows just for the off chance of catching the traffic report? [Britt Godwin]

Jake says: For Windows compatible traffic widgets, try Konfabulator. It's a memory hog, but it looks cool.

Maintaining my focus on little-bitty stuff, I forge ahead into the realm of little-bitty Linux distributions. I have been recently experimenting with the DSL distro, based on the Knoppix build familiar to computer techs the world over. Like Knoppix, DSL (which stands for Damn Small Linux) can be run straight off the CD or run from a RAM disk. Unlike Knoppix, DSL is small enough (<50MB) to be run (and includes a script to install) off a standard flash USB pen drive. 128MB is really the minimum effective size, though a 64MB drive can work as well, if you're not adding too many packages. The distro comes with all the various networking and web-surfing tools, though is lacking a spyware-removal program like Ad-Aware. Surprisingly, it contains not only your basic text/html/etc. editor, but also contains remarkably full-featured word processing and spreadsheet programs as well, bringing the DSL distribution into the realm of a serious office productivity and effective backup/restore emergency volume. Note: not all motherboards support USB booting, so check your manufacturer's website or BIOS settings for compatibility. HP has made available a formatting utility that will suitably format a USB 2.0 flash drive to make it available for booting. The utility supports most major flash drive manufacturers, but mileage may vary. Remember, if using DSL off a flash drive, the memory can only be re/written so many times before failure, so boot off the drive, then switch to the RAM drive or use the included script for making a DOS swap file for sustained use.

Links for downloading DSL are found at the official DSL site, along with forums and help files. As things become smaller and faster, who knows what can be done with them? A mini-ITX board and a flash-based DSL install could serve many purposes, from hardware firewalls and routers, to cheap email and web boxes, making Damn Small Linux certainly a "little monster." [Britt Godwin]

As careful as I am on the web, never filling out frivolous forms to enter into contests or free gifts or even to register for download sites, I got Phished. For those of you who don't know what Phishing is, it is usually an email that looks legitimate (here's a PDF copy of the email I received), from a legitimate source such as eBay, and usually asks for some kind of personal information (like the sample form shown in this PDF), often including social security numbers and credit card information. Some of the better ones, like the one that almost got me, are carbon copies of real email notices from banks, auction sites and other trusted sources. However, any site that is involved with your personal information for legitimate uses will be aware of the growing phenomenon of these clever scams and will never ask for personal information through an email. If there is a valid need for information, they will usually provide some information that you have given them upon signing up to verify your identity, such as the last 4 digits of your Social Security number or credit card number, if one is on file. They will also ask you to log in to your account and further verify your identity before allowing you to adjust any kind of information. This keeps Phishers out, as they will not have access to all the information needed to fulfill these multiple safeguards. If you suspect you have been Phished, contact the institution who purported to send the request through an outside link, such as a fresh email. Do not click on any link, nor send any kind of information through the email you received. Save the email as is, in your inbox; In case it is a scam, an institution (like eBay or a bank) will often want the email forwarded to a secure server they will provide. As always, your best judgment and intuition are the best weapons you have. Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you... :D [Britt Godwin]

Jake says: One way to help protect yourself is to use the free FraudEliminator toolbar for IE and Firefox. It's not a replacement for good judgement, but it certainly can't hurt.

Recently, Microsoft co-founder and chair Bill Gates slipped a teaser to a convention of business journalists regarding the upcoming next-gen XBOX, code named Xenon. While staying vague on details, Gates outlined a plan involving the Xenon console to use a version of Windows Media Center Edition to play as part of a digitally-networked hub, connecting PC's with home electronics and gaming consoles alike. This move brings Microsoft closer to Gates' vision of a fully-integrated digital world, delivering conventional media like television or radio seamlessly alongside traditionally standalone content such as internet or gaming.

Due to be revealed during a half-hour MTV special on May 12, Xenon is set to not only challenge Sony's dominance of the console world with their Playstation 2 and PSX handheld, but aims even higher in delivery of rich content as well. All eyes will be on MTV now to find out how high Microsoft is going to reach. Too high, and consumers won't know what to do with it, but too low, and it will be dismissed as a bump upgrade. Will Xenon glow, or will it be a flash in the pan? MTV will tell... [Britt Godwin]

Jake Says: If you can't wait for the televised special, Engadget offers some behind the scenes snaps from a private launch party.

There is a wealth of knowledge sealed between the mundane covers of books, some worthy of retention in the canon of the great, and others fit for no more than the fate of so many pages in the days before toilet paper. It would take a better person than me to determine which of these categories all but the brightest stars would ultimately inhabit, but thanks to the tireless efforts of a humanitarian file ranking with the noblest of questors, a growing treasure beyond price is available to any who but click to open the doors of the Project Gutenberg. Okay, enough of the elevated diction, but seriously, there is so much knowledge and wisdom to be had for nothing but the time to absorb it. This is one of the great dreams of the internet come true--knowledge free to any who wish to access it. Libraries are archaic and outdated compared to the ease with which you can discuss philosophy and the meaning of life with Plato, or chase the Hound of the Baskervilles with Sherlock Holmes, or, more recently, find out why Steven Levy thinks that Hackers are the Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Being able to see Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, full of all sorts of wild and weird inventions never come to light shows where many of the things we take for granted came from. Helicopters? His idea. My personal favorite of the week is by the inimitable and incorrigible Mark Twain and his discourse On the Decay of the Art of Lying. All of the cable TV and soap operas and crises and questions of the world have come before and will again, and are all there for the taking. Open the door at Project Gutenberg. [Britt Godwin]

Use the force at ThinkGeek.com

This thing has been popping up everywhere and I finally whacked enough 13-year-olds away that I could get my hands on the new "Jedi Negotiation tool," the Star Wars FX light saber. This is not a cheap toy from the grocery toy aisle--this is a metal-and-polycarbonate (the same stuff iBooks are sheathed in) replica of the honorable Jedi dueling weapon. It is officially licensed (although what isn't now?), heavy and fun to whack 13-year-olds with (but I would never condone that, of course). For those of you looking to make internet videos of yourself whirling light sabers around, this is the thing--it lights up (in blue or red), with all the requisite "zzzzaash!" noises, and the sound effects are straight out of the movies. Now you, too can wail away on the Dark Side to your heart's content in the comfort and privacy of someone's Star Wars-themed basement. On a darker note (Ha!) these things can be used to hurt someone (yes, they're fairly solid) and should be treated the same way a staff or broomstick would be used (wildly and with abandon). At $120, these are not priced towards the average 13-year-old, but at our local Borders the other day, a mother and her 6-year-old were playing with one, and the little boy didn't get to play with it much. Running for several hours on a set of batteries, dueling at twilight is just seriously cool to watch, and the motion-sensitive sound effects whisper the allure of the dark side: Come dress up like a fictional character and whack people with light-up swords....

If you need me, I'll be in the basement. Challenge me if you dare, young Padawan... ZZzzaash! [Britt Godwin]

So I got Tiger. Me and thousands of other loyal Mac users around the globe. As a loyal Mac fan since... well, let's just say Steve Jobs has left and returned to the fold in the time I've been a Mac fan. Anyway, I eagerly awaited the release of the next revolution in the Mac world--that of Tiger, OS 10.4. The next Big Thing for we Macheads, allowing us to do more, faster and cleaner than ever before. But at the risk of being shot and lynched, I'm probably the first to pronounce the new OS as... Huh. Ok, I guess. Not the "1984" revolution by far, but Ok. Worth the $129 (or $69 for students)? I don't see it. Major upgrade? Ok, I'll buy that. Worth calling a whole new OS? Nah. Granted, Spotlight is cool, working just like iTunes' search function. However, it's just as many steps as hitting the OpenApple/F hotkeys and typing away, so gadget level = cool. Practically? Eh. It doesn't seem to run any faster on my dual 1.8 GHz, 512MB RAM, FX5200 (what a lame choice of video card for an otherwise hot-rod machine, but that's another rant altogether) G5 machine, and so no huge revelation there, and Dashboard seems to be an official collection of mini-programs that had been floating at one corner or another of the computing world anyway. Mail is streamlined a bit, but since the drawer is now part of the main window, it's kinda just window dressing. And last but not least, (it may just be the gremlins living in my printer...) the driver software for my HP PSC 950 inexplicably disappeared, causing a reinstall to be necessary. All in all, I think Tiger should have been billed as an upgrade, not a full OS. But if anyone asks, we're out of tar and feathers here. [Britt Godwin]

Aaarghh, Matey! It had to go sometime, I supposes. Aye, with the recent decree of the Swedish landlubbers that all pirates in the Swedish Commonwealth be surrenderin', many a fine file-swapper be goin' to the hangin' ladder. But it be not only the file-swappin' pirates this unjust parchment be targetin', but anything that allows a copyright or copy protection to be dodged. Our penguin-toutin' brothers and sisters be gettin' the short end of a plank as well, for commercial DVD's and certain CD's be including copy protection that has to be gotten around to work right with most Linux distro's. Anything that includes Xine or Mplayer or the like is a target for this new law, striking a foul blow against the grand community that is open-source. This cruelly-binding legislation goes into force on July 1, 2005, and similar scribblin's are in the air. The wind be blowin' from the wrong quarter in this battle, me hearties, and nae bodes well for freedom on the high Net.

As Sweden was one of the last bastions of p2p resistance to the RIAA/MPAA hegemony, legal precedent is gaining momentum. At the moment, another last haven is under attack--Canada. The Canadians have issued a press release that in effect says that since privacy rights prohibit them from checking what is being shared, there is no way to be sure what is being posted is illegal. The decision is a dike set against the tide of Recording Industry and Film Industry actions, but how long it will last is yet to be seen. Aaaargh! [Britt Godwin]

More information on Mac OS X Tiger

It's a good day to be a Mac geek--trumping Redmond yet again with a fully updated OS in Tiger, adding over 200 new features, as well as hot rod dual 64-bit G5 desktops shipping with dual-layer drives. Kinda takes Rip, Mix, Burn to a whole new level, doesn't it...? As of this writing Saturday morning, Bittorrent sites are already either crashing under the load of uploaded Tiger torrents, or being forcibly shut down under Apple's recently draconian measures regarding Tigers being released, GM or not. [Britt Godwin]

What I find rather interesting is the feature creep in the Longhorn blogs and information releases regarding "new features in Longhorn that will make it easier and more intuitive to use." Let's analyze a few of these--the new search function is supposed to simplify searching through files by checking not only file names but meta tags and content. Hmmm, haven't we seen that somewhere before? Mac OS has supported searching the comments box since at least OS 8, and the new Spotlight feature of Tiger will search nearly any file for nearly any key, from town names on a .pdf map to tags in a Photoshop document, and beats Longhorn to the punch with file organization, "so the same file can appear in multiple Smart Folders without moving from its original saved location on your system." (Apple.com, 4/29/05) This seems to resemble nothing so much as the elegant iTunes search feature already in widespread use, essentially pre-training users on how to navigate Tiger. In addition, these meta tags containing information about things like people's names in photos and other sensitive information are securely stored, making posts on websites or other methods of disseminating potentially hazardous information safer. Sure, I'll probably pick up a copy of Longhorn when it comes out, but I think I'll wait until Service Pack 2 or 3 first… [Britt Godwin]

Smaller, faster, better. Or sometimes smaller and better instead of faster, but with faster parts that really almost make up the difference. They are SBC computers--Single-board-computers--and they are itty-bitty in a way that 10 years ago was unimaginable. So your phone plays games? Cool. These RAM-stick-sized computers surf the net on 100Base networks and run usable Linux. One, (the C Data Compact Flash Computer) is the size and form factor of a Compact Flash card (type II) and includes 32MB SDRAM and 8MB Flash, and along with a bootable Linux kernel like Damn Small Linux (DSL), can be entirely run off of 2 CFII cards. With the DSL Linux distro able to be embedded in a flash drive, weighing in at a hefty 49.1MB, the potential for small, cheap computers is here. Yes, the AMD Personal Internet Communicator box is no bigger than your average external hard drive enclosure, but a stick of RAM-sized computer run off a Flash drive is pretty spiffy. It's not going to be playing games any time soon, but the ability to take a computer in less space than most peoples' wallets take up has got to be good for something. The possibility of keeping your entire medical history or all your personal information on an Internet-accessible pocket computer that is no bigger (literally) than a large pack of gum is an opportunity waiting to be exploited by somebody and sold to nearly everyone for incredibly cheap, making that intrepid entrepreneur into a rich geek. More info here. [Britt Godwin]

Over the last several years, there has existed a movement to bring cheap computers into all the dark corners of the world. With cheap Internet access on cheap machines, information can be disseminated by sources outside the official channels. We may be able to get the latest headlines of struggles for freedom in Iraq, atrocities in the Balkans, or the other side of stories that the party line doesn't or won't carry directly from those involved. We could find out what the average Iraqi thinks of the war from Iraqis in occupied villages and from Marines occupying that same village. The world is getting smaller, but the Internet is a resource that has yet to achieve it's greatest potential--making the planet a community, and that's only going to happen when Net access is ubiquitous and free for people who cannot afford more than their next meal. This is a significant segment of the human population on this planet, marginalized and forgotten in the fervor of oil struggles, political machinations and headlines about whatever will sell papers. The cover of Newsweek this week is a story speculating on the future of the new Catholic Pope, rather than focusing on what the Pope supposedly stands for--a figurehead of an institution devoted to ministering the needy, the sick, the poor of the world. With worldwide Internet access, those people will have a voice and will be able to speak out, shortening the links between those in need and those who can help.

AMD is at the forefront with their Personal Internet Communicator, a stripped-down, Windows-based, rugged small form-factor machine, built around the Geode processor, a low-power chip running at 366 MHz and a 3.5" HDD. There are already hackers trying to get it to run Damn Small Linux. The BIOS is designed to be only changed through the phone/network provider, making it nearly impervious to viruses and hacking, but makes it difficult to run other OS's. The whole thing is barely bigger than the hard drive itself and retails for under $200. With a bulk buy through a government or education grant, every village and town in the world could have one for less than the budget most governments spend on a Mars Lander. Finding Life on other planets would be a great thing, but there is life here on Earth that needs to be taken care of first. [Britt Godwin]

Offical Apple Tiger Information

3 days until Apple's 64-bit Operating System, 10.4 Tiger is released from Apple's jealously-guarded cage. After what happened with the initial release of OS X, 10.1, as full of bugs and close to beta as anything made by--dare I say it?-Microsoft!--I have lost a little faith in Jobs' Fruit Company. We Appleheads had to wait until 10.3--Three releases until they got it right! And they charged us for each one! And Apple, Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA/Artists' Coalition of Whine wonder why Piracy (yes, with a capital P, there's trouble in River City...) is rampant? When we consumers without recording contracts or golden parachutes look for a piece of software that will fulfill a need in our computing lives, we expect it to work--at least well enough to use it effectively. Nothing's perfect, because it's all made by people, and until things change, there will be bugs. That's OK, but is it too much to ask for the Operating System to be more or less stable? We here in the trenches have gotten tired of buying the latest set of software or games, only to have the drivers or program cause a general protection fault and crash the entire machine. So we download it off Bittorrent sites and try it out, and if it s***s, we toss it. If we find ourselves really getting into a quality game, we buy the full copy so we can mod it and play online and frag our friends. The same goes for Operating Systems, Apple included (which hurts me to say it as I am a long-time Mac Advocate). If 10.4 comes out for $129 retail and is full of the bugs that 10.1 and 10.2 were, I hope it is pirated for all it's worth, and that someone out there hacks it and makes it better. Hopefully, when the stock options start losing value, someone up top will realize that we are tired of paying hard-earned money for crud. Someone will make it work, but whether that someone is on 1 Infinite Loop or not will remain to be seen. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? [Britt Godwin]