Apple

I’ve set up my G4/500 to take part in the XGrid@Stanford project. By installing and running Apple’s XGrid client, you can donate CPU cycles to this project. Currently the project only has about 150 Macs, running at a total of 123Ghz.

Today I was going through old floppy diskettes and found one that had some documents that needed to be archived in a more accessible format than 1.44M floppies. Unfortunately, it was from my PowerMac 7500 days (OS9 at best), and my OSX PowerBook doesn’t have a floppy. There’s all sorts of nasty software you can install on a windows box, but I needed a simple, one-off solution to get the files off the disk, without needing to reboot on a live linux CD image or anything wacky like that.

Here’s everything you could possibly want to know about Apple retail stores — and then some.

Here’s how to turn your iPod into a Universal Infrared Remote Control.

I’m terribly lame for only having discovered this now.

Here’s how to fix MoveableType’s Bookmarklets in Safari.

I’ve been using a Fedora workstation in conjuction with my iBook at work, and I’ve gotten used to the handy ‘lock screen’ button on the Gnome toolbar.

I wanted the same type of ‘lock screen’ button for OSX, but didn’t know of any quick and easy way to enable it. I did some research, and came up with this nice [but oddly hidden] method:

Keychain Access is used to store passwords to web sites, network servers, and lockable volumes. However, it also provides a quick way of securing your computer.

Yes! Apple just released iTunes 4.5, which includes a lot of new features, the most important [to me] being the ability to make Smart Playlists that include other Smart Playlists.

What I’ve been doing lately is creating two playlists: “Top 4GB of songs, rated 3 or higher, not played in 2 weeks, sorted by rating”, and “Danger!!”, which is 2GB of completely random stuff [and in a library of 18000 songs or more, it’s really dangerous].

Sam introduced me to Firestarter FX, which is a nice little CD-burning app for OSX.

It supports the following features:

Backs up CDs that neither Apple’s Disc-Copy nor Roxio Toast can backup.
iso and cue/bin support.
Overburning.
iso and cue/bin image creation.
2-click folder backup.
2-click CDRW erase.
Simulation.
Customizable RAM cache.
High speed burning.
Buffer under-run technology.
Multi-session burning.
Paranoia audio-cd ripping, for best error protection copy.
CDDB access to automatically create CD-TEXT data.
CD-TEXT reading and writing with drives that support it.

My Matrix screen saver — Red Pill — kicks your Matrix screen saver’s ass.

Over the weekend, I upgraded my G4 to Panther. I’ve been pretty nervous about doing so, because there were a few things wrong with the existing Jaguar install. The G4 acts as my main fileserver, with 160GB of storage in a mirrored RAID, so it’s pretty important that it didn’t crash and burn during an upgrade.

I got a 120GB drive from Tech-EE’s and crammed it into the G4’s case. With 3 drives, I’ve still got room for 3 more, though I’m not sure the power supply can handle that many, considering the main drive is a Quantum Fireball 18GB SCSI LVD 15,000rpm drive.