While I still have to finish my HOW-TO on duplicating DVDs (hmm), this product struck my attention: Fast DVD Copy.

An all-in-one-one-click commercial app that duplicates your personal DVDs - and commercial ones for that matter - switched them to region free (and presumably disables Macrovision).

For USD 99, version 2 allows you to select the bonus you want - or don't want for that matter. The previous version duplicated the lot, limiting to a maximum of 97 minutes the movies it could copy. Apparently, this has been addressed in the latest version.

Beware of the licensing scheme - install it on the computer that will be used to duplicate:

Your license is valid for one computer only. If you want to install Fast DVD Copy on a second Mac, you need to buy a second license.In addition, your Fast DVD Copy license is computer-specific. Your serial number will only work on the Mac that you licensed it for.

Remember the days when we use to defrag our disks with Norton SpeedDisk? When was the last time you defragged under Mac OS X? No need to thanks to Mac OS X built-in measures against fragmentation?

Learn more about the topic by reading Amit Singh's "Fragmentation on HFS+ Volumes" on kernelthread.com.

Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile, in most cases because the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation.

It is risky to defragment anyway: What if there's a power glitch? What if the system crashes? What if the defragmenting tool has a bug? What if you inadvertently reboot? In some cases, you could make the situation worse by defragmenting.

O'Reilly's part two gives interesting information on what Junk Mail Filter is, and isn't. A good read for anyone using Mail.app

The Fight Against Spam, Part 2

Interestingly enough, the technology that underlies the Junk Mail filter began its life as an information retrieval system, developed in the Apple labs to help users who managed thousands or millions of large documents find the one they were looking for easily. In order to do that, this technology had to allow users to perform a search by topic.

Simon Thornton presents an interesting idea on his weblog ("a mutual misunderstanding"): connect a DV input device to your Mac and make iChat believe it's a firewire cam ..

Sending Live Television Via iChat

In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something - oooh, let's just say your Sky Digibox for example - to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.

There really is a power drain problem with Apple's superb iSight camera.

I switched to a larger external firewire drive earlier this year, and after my loyal 6Gb VST (SmartDisk now), 20Gb iPod (G2), 20Gb LaCie 'DataBank', I'm walking around with a 40Gb LaCie 'by F.A. Porsche' .

I use it mainly for synchronising my e-mail, bookmarks, preferences, and current work between my desktop and PowerBook, so the amount of data that is transferred each time is now tremendous as I sync twice a day. Nevertheless, I've been copying large files (7Gb+) recently which all caused my desktop Mac to lockup. It wasn't a crash per se, but a number of warnings and errors started to appear in the system logs which lead to the freeze of the GUI with a kernel load of 99.9%. This situation occurred each time I tried to copy those large files, or loads of small ones (20'000+).

My first thought was to incriminate the system, as the external drive worked fine on my other desktop Mac and PowerBook. I explored all sorts of solutions, ending up by a complete OS reinstall. But to no avail - the problem didn't disappear - until I realised that my iSight and the LaCie drive were both plugged into the motherboard Firewire connectors - which was the only difference between that Mac and the two others.

Unplugging the drive during a freeze resolved the problem. The load drops, the system generates an error, but you regain control of your Mac. Apparently, the iSight drains power on both ports, leaving the second one underpowered.

At least for the 'F.A. Porsche' LaCie. I never had that problem with the 'DataBank' (which only offers one firewire connector, against two for the 'F.A. Porsche' - which was what decided me for the model over the 40Gb 'DataBank'.

This problem is evoked on Apple Discussions in various threads. I should have known.

So, I sorted that mess out by adding a Belkin Firewire PCI card to my desktop Mac. Everyone is happy. Everyone is powered.

If you're experiencing problems after upgrading to Airport 3.4, typically loss of signal strength and disconnection, you'll find instructions on how to downgrade at,

http://homepage.mac.com/fishsun/articles/uninstall_airport34.htm

More info and discussions on,

• Slashdot
• Apple discussion board
• MacFixIt

I didn't manage to upgrade to Airport 3.3.1 after reinstalling 3.1. xlr8yourmac has several workarounds. The first one worked for me.

Well, believe it or not, this afternoon at 16:15 CET Intego publishes a press release announcing the launch of a Mac OS X Trojan Horse, just after my copy of VirusBarrier popped up with this alert around 15:50 CET:

My definitions were updated this morning by NetUpdate adding the ability to detect MP3 Concept.

I immediately checked the net for more in fo, but was unable to find anything before this evening. But when I write these lines, the CIAC, McAfee, Sophos or Symantec don't mention it. Even Google didn't turn up anything..

MacNN and Slashdot have a post, but the info remains sparse and unconfirmed.

The alert was triggered when I launched BBEdit, and was reproducable once eventhough I clicked 'Repair' on the VirusBarrier alert dialog box. No MP3 files in my case..

Here's a copy of the e-mail alert:

Date: 04/08/2004 15:50:35 Europe/Zurich +0200
File: /.vol/234881033/2656577
Virus: MP3Virus.Gen

Date: 04/08/2004 15:50:52 Europe/Zurich +0200
File: /.vol/234881033/930750
Virus: MP3Virus.Gen

It's actually the first time I've seen it work
:/

April 9 update:

MacNN has an full update on the matter, and a Usenet thread sheds more light on this matter.

0x2a posted an interesting comment which I fully share.

April 11 update:

More info and comments from MacFixIt, Wired, and a clarification from Intego.

Likewise, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Sequeira said the company was investigating. "We are aware of the potential issue identified by Intego and are working proactively to investigate it," she said.

The other discovery of the day: JunkMatcher

A set of scripts that can be added to Mail.app rules. It uses various effective techniques such as IP-based filtering, and flexible regular expressions to identify junk mails, and comes with a GUI front end which enables you to analyse what's going on and tweak it efficency. You can even report spam to SpamCop.net directly from the log window.

There's a clip on the product's website that shows it in action.

Have you tried the latest Microsoft Wireless Optical mouse ? What interested me to try was the new scroll wheel, which gives you the smoothest scroll I have ever experienced, and the possibility to scroll horizontally by tilting the scroll wheel to the left or right.

The scroll experience is awesome, unfortunately the ergonomic design of the mouse gaves me cramps in the wrist, and the horizontal scroll required the Microsoft driver to be installed.
:(

But I discovered quite by accident this morning that horizontal scrolling is built in Mac OS X. (for as long as you own a scroll wheel mouse)

Hold the shift key down while using your scroll wheel, and the content scrolls horizontally.

This is not new. MacOSXHints published this hint back in October 2003 - but I was quite pleased to stumble upon it by accident!

Google's new free e-mail service, GMail, doesn't support Safari (yet). You get 1Gb free storage with Google's search engine (Don't sort, search).

Among the notable features, you'll find,

• Select a message and all relate message are highlighted (threads, replies)
• Customisable spam filter
• No popups, no ads - but relevant text-ads à la Google ..

The service is still in beta, and widely available, and English is the only language available at the time of writing.

What should we think about this new service? After indexing the web, usenet, weblogs (Blogger), Google will track our e-mail content..
:/

PS: noticed today's cool date? 04-04-04

Can't stop laughing..

I won’t spare the niceties: what Doug Bowman and Stopdesign have done is disgraceful and unprofessional.

For a so-called “Design Consultancy” to rip off the work of another for its own site shows a total lack of regard for others in the profession, and undermines — no, cheapens — the industry as a whole.

What makes this particularly heinous is that not two weeks ago, Mr. Bowman had the audacity to talk about CSS Theft in front of a packed conference room at SXSW2004. In one ear, out the other…?

A sad day for those of us working on the web. Please feel free to go over to Stopdesign and make some noise in protest.

Mezzoblue or Stop Design or Mezzoblue or ..

Apple has reorganised their developer's documentation and technotes into a new ADC Reference Library.

I like the way the information is organised. It reminds me a little of the support forum. The hierarchy feels logic (well, it suits my logic anyway). The topics are clearly outlined, with informative sidebar links to relevant internal or external resources. The search engine is a powerful way of finding what you're looking for. This reference will stand in good place in my reference bookmarks.

A comprehensive collection of Apple technical resources, including Documentation, Technical Notes, Sample Code, Technical Q&As, and Release Notes. Each of the links below leads to the resources for a specific topic. Key resources also include Getting Started documents, API references, and cross-references for related topics.

Photo and Album Printing have been activated in iPhoto for (most) European users.

These features allows you to print your pictures and photo albums. I'll let you know how good they are as soon as I received my prints and albums.

The price in Switzerland is quite competitive (CHF 0.55 for a 10x15cm) - let's wait to evaluate the delivery times and quality.

iTMS where are you ..?

Mac OS 10.0 turns 3 today. It was launched on March, 24 2001, remember ? Seems ages ago, no?

After four major releases, Mac OS X has become as part of my every day life as Mac OS 9 was (and 8, and 7, and 6, ..). Moreover, this month sees the back of the last Classic application I couldn't do without (MacPay). Its final Cocoa version is due out on March 26. I must admit that my 9 icon has been bouncing less and less in my Dock for the last 18 months now.

Wink: Emma turned 3 too in March ;)

040326 update; ArsTechnica has a nice post on this event capturing the essentials of the last 3 years.

You are probably all aware that your Mac runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts to check the integrity of your system and clean it up.

The Unix subsystems on Mac OS X were originally written for machines that were typically never shut off. Mac OS X inherits this assumption in version 1.x, and has many system maintenance tasks that are scheduled to run between 3 am and 5 am. In addition, there are scripts designed to run weekly on weekends, and once a month in the middle of the night.
Orig. MacJanitor

Utilities such as MacJanitor or Cocktail solved this problem by allowing you to run them manually. But you still had to think of doing it. Another solution is to change the time and day at which they are supposed to run, hoping that your computer would powered on then. Utilities such as CronniX help you do right that and more -- you can also edit the cron table by hand.

Downloading the latest version of DéjàVu, I fell on a reference to Anacron:

Anacron is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that don't run 24 hours a day. When installed and configured properly, Anacron will make sure that the commands are run at the specified intervals as closely as machine-uptime permits.
[snip]
It isn't a full-time daemon. It has to be executed from boot scripts, from cron-jobs, or explicitly.

Now this is just what I've been looking for for my AlPB which is seldom powered on at 3:00a. I changed the execution time of the maintenance scripts, but that doesn't help if the Mac is sleeping or off.. I'l give it a try and let you know.